In Gran Torino Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and retired Detroit autoworker who, as the movie opens, is mourning the death of his wife. There are three acts. In the first, Eastwood plays a crotchety, deeply racist and unhappy man whose ire is raised by everything, but especially the Hmong family next door. Act II sees his character mellow, become friendly and attached to this family, or at least the teenage son and daughter, and try to help the son gain skills, a job and some sort of confidence in himself. The Hmong family substitutes for his own family and children, from whom he has become estranged, and he becomes the de facto protector of the largely Hmong neighborhood. In Act III Eastwood contemplates vengeance in response to the brutality of a local Hmong gang.
I honestly don’t yet know what to make of this movie. On the one hand, the change of heart on the part of the Walt character is simply implausible and doesn’t work onscreen. To see him happily sitting at a kitchen table and grinning as wizened Hmong women feed him their native delicacies, or launching into advice to the teenage son on how to attract women right after fixing a wobbly dryer, is at odds with the withdrawn, irascible man we first meet. More importantly, Walt’s deep, unthinking racism is played for laughs for most of the movie. I watched this in a packed movie theater and gales of laughter greeted his casual epithets, indeed the Hmong characters seemed amused along with the rest of us. I have no objection to the racism – it is integral to Walt’s character and the movie – but why are we invited to find this funny and even a sign of his growing humanity?
On the other hand, Eastwood puts in a really wonderful, deeply touching, performance, using his magnificent stony face to convey disgust, loneliness, anger and pride through tiny flickers of expression. The sense of a man who believes that everything he fought and worked for throughout his life has turned to shit is in every close up of that face. And the denouement redeems the movie, if only because it returns Walt to the angry and prideful man that we first met. This is so good, in so many ways. And yet the audience is ultimately being asked to like Eastwood’s character too much. It is not enough that he do the right thing; we have to like him, and the effort to make him likeable only makes him look foolish.
Nice catch. I haven’t read your review yet but I will when I get a chance to see the film. I think Minneapolis gets this one on the 2nd or, most likely, the 9th. They were supposed to shoot this film in Saint Paul (largest Hmong population in America), but Michigan offered Eastwood better tax breaks.
Could this be the last raspy gasp of the “greatest generation,” or is the film simply lamenting the decline of the American automobile industry (it’s hip, rugged whiteness). I don’t know. What I do know is that Gran Torino was painful to watch (those “mentoring” scenes between Walt and Thao; every time the camera entered the barber shop). Clint had a few moments, and the film is certainly interesting, ideologically speaking, as you attempt to situate it within his oeuvre; but, man, he laid the xenophobic, curmudgeonly geezer schtick on a bit thick. Growing up in a city where there is a large Hmong population (not to mention sharing a street with a number of Hmong families), I was very interested in the film (over a third of my wife’s 5/6 multi-age classroom are Hmong and I’ve enjoyed spending some time with them over the last few months, and, of course, Hamline continues to develop and increase our Hmong student population). For many Americans, I imagine, Hmong culture will be quite new, unique even, “exotic” dare I say. Still, I don’t think the film does the culture any favors nor do I think the film understands the culture very well. It is certainly always cool to be represented, but it helps to get it right. And the racist rhetoric! I mean, I guess I get it. Let’s get past the “words” in order to man-up and move forward or some such shit (interesting how the n-word is nowhere to be found). Authenticity means seeing past ethnic difference to get at the essence of manhood? I don’t see color? Ultimately, this is a Clint Eastwood picture–the martyrdom of St. Wally–and as his character moves from white devil to white savior, I grew weary and a bit embarrassed.
I’m not sure why I watched this, as I’ve become increasingly weary (very apt word, Jeff) of Eastwood in general, and I think Chris and Jeff both nail some fundamental flaws with this film. Jeff’s dead on about how the film sells masculinity as authenticity, deploying its casual dated Bunkeresque racism as if it’s easy to see through it to some kind of allegedly pure human relation. (Perhaps it’s particularly tough to swallow this a few days after a crotchety old white racist who was estranged from his family shot up DC’s Holocaust museum.) And Chris is dead-right that the film is weakest at its marshmallowy center, where we’re supposed to like Walt.
But in a way I’m going to build on that problem, and quibble slightly with Chris, and briefly return to beat a drum about Eastwood that I have before, to say that his performance is not good, not good at all. It isn’t just that the problem is Walt’s likability. It’s the need to make Walt self-aware. This film was always going to be a study in liberal sentimentality, but a great performer and a great director could have found in Walt a different kind of salvation–a figure whose pride and ignorance never (ought) to go away, whose resistance to redemption would force the audience into tighter corners, into tougher identifications, against tougher truths. We should see Walt as confused, confounded–I could even buy that he accepts being taken under Sue’s wing, and in turn takes Thao under his–could buy that a man whose anger is so burnished that he can’t find any empathy for his own family might nonetheless be seeking it wherever it might come without any real costs to his pride, without any true confession. But Eastwood doesn’t just want us to like Walt; he makes Walt smart. Walt knows himself — we watch flashes in Walt’s eyes which show him seeing himself, recognizing how others see him, we see a very, very intelligent performer… and this is, as Chris noted, absolutely implausible given the setting and plot laid out before us. It’s as if Eastwood’s pride as a performer gets in the way–we see the nuance, and fuck–I am pretty familiar with guys like Walt–nuance ain’t their strong suit. They can be intelligent, incisive–but they are far from self-reflexive. It’s a showy performance, Oscar-bait, and it is a fifty-pound weight around the neck of a film that already has problems staying afloat.
I could put up with the schmaltzy antiquated melodrama of the white man who finds his soul, but I was longing for the toughness of (say) Wayne’s Ethan Edwards — who right up to the moment he performs his rescue we fear might actually kill, who at picture’s end drops off the girl and lingers in the doorway and then has to leave. Ethan learns nothing, saves her without saving himself, and he’s exiled, no Christ-like martyrdom, no one even paying any attention to him any more. The family walks inside, and he walks away. That’s a tough film about the interrelations of American masculinity and racial/ethnic identity, and that’s a tough-minded performance. Eastwood is much ballyhooed, but he’s a lot more Stanley Kramer than John Ford.
A very smart read, and I agree. The self-awareness is jarring in this role. But I wonder if you are generalizing here to the other roles that Eastwood has played? You say at the beginning of your post that you have long had a problem with Eastwood, and you return to a more general theme at the end.
Would you say the same of the Eastwood of, say, Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven (my personal favorites)? I have always thought that Eastwood managed masculinity shorn of sentimentality better than most (though with lapses, certainly), and that he almost always does walk away at the end, alone.
No, you’re right–my “long” problem is maybe over some 15 years, but the guy has near 50 in the business, so it’s not fair. I love his work as an actor, through most of that career; as you say, he’s got a dazzlingly flinty way of playing the hyper-masculine with an edge of ironic critique, even in the worst of the Dirty Harry films, and he’s always had a willingness to play that image against itself–the understated Bronco Billy, for instance, or the very strong performance of a conflicted, perverse detective in some crappy serial-killer thing the name of which I forget.
I think it’s the directorial Eastwood that bugs me, the one of the last few films. I flat hated Million Dollar Baby, and all the things I despised in that film seem to percolate through this performance, too. Maybe I’m just (over)reacting to the last 10 years’ hyperbole about his skills as a director.
I rewatched Unforgiven not long ago, and it is good, and Eastwood is good. But Hackman, man HACKMAN. Imagine him in Gran Torino? He is a guy willing to burrow deeply into the neuroses or psychoses and failings of his characters, without a hint of self-aggrandizement in the performances. I taught Bonnie & Clyde this last semester, and his performance as Clyde’s dipshit likable brother was so embedded in the character’s blustery stupidity that you could get fooled that it wasn’t performance. It was smart as hell, that performance, but the wit all went underground, into the embodiment, didn’t advertise itself.
Agreed. I can forgive Hackman for pretty much everything (and there is fair amount to forgive in recent years) after his Unforgiven role. From the comic roof-fixing scenes to his cold brutality in the brothel, it is a fabulous performance.
I haven’t seen Eastwood’s most recent, but I agree wholeheartedly about Hackman. His death in the back seat of Bonnie & Clyde’s car is one of the greatest performances by one of our greatest actors–it’s right up there with that incredible scene in French Connection II where, as Popeye Doyle, he manically blathers on about baseball as he goes cold turkey. Compare his backseat bloodbath to Roth’s in Reservoir Dogs and you have the difference between burrowing deeply into the character and going over the top of it.
You can’t blame Tim Roth for overacting on that one. I have to think that the bigger difference would be between Arthur Penn and Quentin Tarantino. I can’t imagine Tarantino was encouraging Roth to tone it down. (I love Reservoir Dogs though – and agree that Hackman was frequently amazing.)
Yeah, I like Tim Roth. I blame Tarantino.