Eastwood Elevates Torino to Something Grand
The main question concerning Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is whether or not it would work near as well if Dirty Harry wasn’t playing the lead character. The simple fact is that Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski is a pretty nasty piece of work. He’s inflexible, iron-willed, behind the times, disgusted by humanity and almost incurably racist. He is an old curmudgeon who has watched the moral code of the day pass right by him, the things he does and says so startlingly offensive they almost turn your stomach.
Clint Eastwood takes matters into his own hands in Warner Bros' Gran Torino
Yet with the director playing the character – rumored to be his last hurrah as an actor – Kowalski takes on a tragic, almost epic aura spanning the last half century. This is Harry Calahan, this is Blondie, this is Lt. Morris Schaffer, this is William ‘Bill’ Munny, this is Cpl. John McBurney, this is Josey Wales, this is Wes Block, this is Ben Shockley, this is Philo Beddoe, this is Frankie Dunn, this is Frank Horrigan. This singular man is all of the iconic actor/director’s signature roles compiled over the decades all rolled into one, the ghosts of each and every one of them hovering over the film like Marley haunting Scrooge.
And thus you have the quandary. Would the movie work with any other actor – name any of them, I don’t care who – playing the lead role? Is this character nothing more then perfectly symmetrical play on the Eastwood mythology? Or, is it in fact an uncanny continuation of a haunted, exacting, imperfect everyman driven to do the right thing even if he has to go by his own murky moral understanding of justice to see it accomplished?
I can’t help but vote for the latter while still acknowledging a strong assist to the former. Starting with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and continued in one fashion or another in Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifters, The Beguiled, Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Tightrope, Unforgiven and A Perfect World, Kowalski is the grand summation of rigidly moralistic iconoclast who believes entirely in his own code of ethics. It’s not that he hates minorities, he hates everyone, society’s inability to differentiate between what he interprets as right and wrong turning him into a disgruntled, angry loner impossible to love.
This is its own film, of course, completely unconnected to any of those past efforts. But focusing on the storyline creates more problems then it solves, Nick Schenk’s screenplay, taken from a story co-written by he and Dave Johannson, almost too simplistic for its own good. Kowalski’s transformation is far too easy, his ultimate sacrifices maybe powerful and poignant but that still doesn't make them altogether believable.
It also doesn’t help that the two actors playing the primary Hmong immigrants living next door to the old curmudgeon, Ahney Her and Bee Vang, aren’t particular good, the latter delivering an excitedly histrionic performance akin to the noisy sound of nails grinding down a chalkboard. His cimactic moment of anger and frustration is more laughable than laudable, making his friendship with the racist war hero a little tougher to believe then it otherwise might have been.
Yet Eastwood the director, coupled with the powerfully complicated and bravely uncompromising performance of Eastwood the star, somehow manages to gloss over these handicaps with restrained, subtly unflinching ease. As a filmmaker, few have proven to be as dynamic or as important in the latter stages of their careers as he has been, and from Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby to Letters from Iwo Jima he has shown a monumental gift for genre storytelling defying the usual Hollywood conventions.
I can’t say Gran Torino belongs in that rarified company. It’s too on the nose, too obvious with its use of symbolism and too staid in its almost blatantly old-fashioned structure. But the movie moves like lightening, and just because its punches are familiar ones they still tend to hit home like a sledgehammer. The basic themes may be a little on the cliché side but that doesn’t make them any less effective, the ultimate destination as emotionally devastating as just about any other dramatic journey I’ve taken this year.
It is that performance, however, that ultimately puts the film over the top. His entire career, every single role that has come before, culminates in Walt Kowalski. Eastwood invests him with the interior baggage and rugged nuances of a man who has seen all that life has had to offer, both good and bad, and refused to compromise. It is masterful work, making the man another signature figure for an actor who has already filled the proverbial playbook with tons of them.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
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