Movie Review: Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”

Ah, the dollar show– bastion of the poverty-stricken cinephile. Yesterday, for two crumpled dollars, my wife and I got to see Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino on the big screen, and boy, am I glad I did.

It’s not that it’s a “big” movie, per se, the way Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers was a big movie. While this film has it share of violent set-pieces, it’s extremely low-key, subtle, closely-observed. Which is really the perfect choice for Eastwood the Director to make; it’s the same choice that Eastwood the Actor has made with all his best performances. There’s a reason that he’s a man that can hold our attention simply by squinting.

Eastwood’s best performances are always tough-edged and shorn of easy sentiment. His best films are the same way: clear-eyed about life as we know it today, acknowledging the joys without forgetting the disappointments. In Gran Torino, it becomes apparent fairly early on that Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski doesn’t much care for his two sons and the grandchildren they’ve given him– the granddaughter with the pierced belly button and skimpy skintight clothes is a particular irksome cause for consternation.

In a lesser movie (say, any one of the prepackaged “indies” that come out every year, complete with an all-star cast and some bullpuckey about how it’s the little movie that could), Walt and his granddaughter would bond and learn to accept one another. But Eastwood knows that some fences never get mended, and that real people often never let go of their disappointments and their grudges. Even as Kowalski starts to accept the Hmong family next door, and to bond with Thao, the conflicted and vulnerable son of that family, he never drops his prejudices, never stops spewing racist invective.

The film’s violence is a strange thing. The threat of it is there at the beginning; Kowalski effects two different rescues simply by holding a gun and talking like Clint Eastwood, without a single shot being fired. The bulk of the film is devoted to the relationship between Kowalski and Thao, as the former attempts to “man-up” the latter. For a while, you forget the violence that haunted the film’s early moments. In fact, you’re glad it’s gone– you just want to see these people live their lives in peace.

And that’s when the violence comes back, as unwelcome in their world as it is in ours. It’s movie violence that feels like real violence, that really hurts us, that makes us afraid. How it all wraps up, I leave for you to discover.

Though the film isn’t really about plot anyway. It is about looking: looking at life, looking at other people, looking at Clint Eastwood. It’s that rare film that is perfectly attuned to its leading man’s performance, where the style of the film, its cutting, pacing, and shot composition, all flows out of the way he stands, the way he squints, the way he growls, functioning as an extension of his body, of his self.

It’s the most satisfying picture Eastwood has made in years.

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