the memorable Golden Years of Walt Kowalski

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2008)

Seeing Clint Eastwood now is like looking at a face weathered away on a mountain ridge. The crevices go so deep on his face that one has to put that right alongside the voice, which is now so growl-like (indeed Eastwood's Walt Kowalski does growl in some scenes) that he would be a dead-ringer to play Batman if Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns ever got adapted (yeah, he's in his 50s in the comic book, it's not a stretch really for Clint when you think about it). At 78, you wouldn't want to cross his path down a dark alley, or even just in a diner, without paying some proper respects. It's his presence, if nothing else, that makes Gran Torino compulsively watchable. It may be flawed with some of its dialog and plotting, as well as some key performances. But it's Clint Eastwood directing and Clint Eastwood the star acting in a near perfect two-dimensional performance (it works best as that, anything too much explained actually defeats the strengths of Kowalski for the audience), which makes it a minor must-see.
But there's more. Gran Torino showcases, in some scenes that have blistering comic effect, a rarity in movies: a drama about racism that focuses on a main character who is a kind of dying breed of pre-Baby-Boomer era racist blue-collar white workers who love drinking their beer, cursing out minorities (sometimes just kidding around or what amounts to kidding around, sometimes definitely not). It is in that sense kind of like a Dirty Harry picture, in that Eastwood's character is an equal opportunity offender. But he also is wearing a similar hat to his Million Dollar Baby persona, complete with a pestering Priest and a protégé in Thao (Bee Vang). He's a curmudgeon, and the kind that audience's eat up. At first, indeed, it's instantly comical, like a more parody-like take on the old-man Eastwood persona, grumbling around during his deceased wife's after-funeral dinner and while, well, sitting on his porch chugging Pabst Blue Ribbon and getting his shotgun out at those punk Asian gang-bangers having fights on his lawn.
This leads to the obvious point that what Eastwood does as an actor makes it so watchable because it's layered: we get the "Get off my lawn!" line that made the trailer look as funny as it is- this is, at least for a good half of the movie, a kind of comical Eastwood performance without ever breaking a sweat- and as a soul who can't seem to figure on knowing how to live since knowing death is kind of easy as a veteran. And yet, for all of the joy in watching an icon like him on screen, and for some of the memorable scenes that make it enjoyable (oddly enough, since it's not as good a film as it, more enjoyable conventionally than Changeling from just two months ago), its not up to snuff with what Eastwood's done this decade at his best. In his 70s he's been more or less on a roll, making masterpieces like Mystic River and Letters from Iwo Jima and even near-excellent pics like Million Dollar Baby.
Gran Torino, sadly, isn't one of them; for everything that Eastwood has going for him as star of the picture, he doesn't cast the bulk of the supporting parts well: Vang is actually dead-flat or just flubbing a lot of this character of Thao, and his sister Sue (Her) doesn't far much better. The Father (Carley) is decent but ineffective, and these kinds of average pieces of acting surrounding Eastwood magnify some of the phoned-in qualities in the script. While it goes without saying Gran Torino is nowhere near as hackneyed as Crash or lame as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, for every powerful scene dealing with racism in the picture there's another that's just a little too tidy. It works best to see Kowalski not changing much by the picture's end, being still pretty true to who he is as a good person and a mean SOB, as opposed to silly scenes with the Korean gang who are gone for very long chunks of time from the story.
For everything that doesn't work with the picture though it's just a lot of fun seeing Eastwood as this character. I'm not sure it is his last performance, as I hope it wouldn't be (as an optimist I'd hope he could find just one more icon-defining-and-redefining role before he moves on or retires), but it's not at all a sucker's way out of his iconic place. That's the way Clint, like Walt, would like it.