|
|
The Current Cinema
"Gran Torino" belongs to a grumpy old man
|
The overexposed look of the movie "Gran Torino" serves to accentuate the harshness of the down-at-its-heels Detroit neighborhood where Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) seems determined to make his last stand.
Widowed as the film opens, Kowalski's troubled Korean War vet could have provided a layered, age-appropriate role for the iconic Hollywood tough guy, but Eastwood's character here rarely transcends the caricature of a grumpy old man, albeit with the good guy's requisite soft heart and sense of self-sacrifice. Of course, Eastwood's success was built on melodrama, even if some of his later work arguably owes its critical acclaim to increased forbearance from the actor/director.
In "Gran Torino," Eastwood's character still plays with guns a half century after his service in Korea, including the rifle he used during that United Nations' police action. But in his senior moments Kowalski only pulls a make-believe trigger with an empty hand mimicking a gun; except for once, when the old man trips in his garage while confronting a hapless teenaged neighbor who has been put up to stealing the Gran Torino of the film's title as a gang initiation.
The nocturnal confrontation is one of the movie's most compelling scenes. The action is bathed in intermittent light from a wildly swaying overhead lamp that has been bumped accidentally, heightening the tension as we are repeatedly plunged into darkness during crucial action. That piece of expressionistic filmmaking also emphasizes the post traumatic stress that has been haunting Kowalski since Korea. The Asian countenance of would-be thief Thao (Bee Vang), born in Michigan of Hmong parents who emigrated from Vietnam, confronts Kowalski in the dark garage like a hallucination of a young North Korean soldier he killed in the war.
The next day Kowalski parks the Gran Torino, which no one ever drives anymore, on the apron of his driveway, defiantly displaying the mint condition muscle car he himself helped build 36 years earlier while working on the assembly line.
When the gang returns to "give Thao a second chance," Clint's character shuffles across his yard with shouldered rifle to get the interlopers off his lawn, thwarting the kidnapping of Thao in the process. Whereas Dirty Harry could threaten armed robbers in the midst of their crime with "Go ahead, make my day," a civilian, war veteran or not, can't exactly expect a free pass if he blows away some punks wrestling on his lawn. Kowalski and Eastwood realize this and as the violence escalates, the filmmaker takes the narrative in another direction.
The calm, methodic plugging of multiple adversaries, who themselves prove unable to return accurate gunfire in the stress of the moment, is an Eastwood trope. In "Gran Torino," it is alluded to by Kowalski repeatedly. At the film's climax, he enigmatically raises his empty hand in the shape of a gun, and thumbs the trigger at the half dozen heavily armed gangbangers aligned against him. That enigma is solved by Kowalski's final fast draw.
"Gran Torino" is fun, has little and big laughs, and plenty of politically incorrect insults and vintage Eastwood dialog. But despite the realistic themes it dances around and the hard economic reality Tom Stern's cameras reveal, it certainly is not meant to be taken seriously, not from the opening scenes of Kowalski growling at all that displeases him to a later scene where the shuffling septuagenarian lays a brutal beating on a fireplug of a gangbanger without recourse to even a single ampule of nitroglycerin.
While Thao expiates his attempted theft through manual labor, Kowalski's bottled-up anger visibly rejuvenates the old warrior, for better or for worse.
The real tragedy highlighted in "Gran Torino" is the isolation within society and families, whether caused by bigotry, selfishness, religious tradition or post traumatic stress syndrome.
Final credits roll over Thao cruising along a pastoral stretch of Lake Erie shorefront. That pacific landscape is anathema to everything we have been shown and while it may in and of itself imply freedom, it falls short here of providing a liberating coda for troubled Thao.
Walking out of the cinema, I overheard someone say Kowalski "did exactly the opposite of what Clint would have done." Yeah, I thought, and for what? More holes than Clyde Barrow and Sonny Corleone combined.
| |
|
|
|
| |
