Gran Torino - coming soon
I first heard about Gran Torino in a New York Times review, in which it was billed as “a sleek, muscle car of a movie made in the U.S.A.” which presented life in the “industrial graveyard” of real America - run-down shells of once grander houses in suburbs ruled by the same vicious gangs you would expect to find in tough, inner-city ghettos. This is a far cry from the aspirational, model-village setting of American Beauty or Desperate Housewives. But while the film’s premise is a promising one, a starchy script and wooden acting fail to deliver.
Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an embittered Korean War veteran who spends his days sitting out on his front porch, rifle by his side, gulping back beer and snarling at his troubled neighbourhood which has gradually slid down the monopoly board and is now largely inhabited by impoverished immigrants.
Walt sees himself as a custodian of values that are quickly slipping away, and wishes he could return to the time when his wife was alive and white people were in the majority. So when a Vietnamese family - “gooks” and “chinks” all of them - moves in next door and carries out its domestics on his carefully mowed lawn, Walt loses his rag. Even the fresh-faced Padre (Christopher Carley), whose oily manner almost equals that of Mr Collins in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, struggles to make him see reason let alone bring him to confession.
Walt’s relationship with his neighbours seems unsalvageable when their teenage son Thao (Bee Vang) is bullied by local tough guys into trying to rob Walt’s most valuable possession: a 1972 Gran Torino that Walt helped build in his days as a car mechanic. But at the behest of his feisty sister Sue, (Ahney Her), Thao offers to do odd jobs for Walt by way of apology, and little by little, the old man’s stony heart begins to warm to his neighbours.
Unfortunately this promising plot is ruined by heavy-handed direction and a turgid script from writer Nick Schenk which spoon-feeds its audience, who are apparently too stupid to work out the ramifications of each new plot twist for themselves. Take the conversation between Walt and his eldest son, Mitch. The film has already made it abundantly clear that the two don’t get on - Mitch and family spend the whole of their grandmother’s funeral muttering complaints about him, and are determined to install Walt in a retirement home, against his will. To reiterate the point, Walt rings Mitch after receiving some bad news from the doctor, but Mitch evidently has no desire to talk and quickly hangs up, giving “too much work” as his excuse. And if this isn’t evidence enough of the bad relationship, Walt then gives us mini-soliloquy, muttering to himself that he has “more in common with these gooks than I do with my own family”.
At other times the script is plain ridiculous. Walt has decided to help Thao find a job on a construction site. What follows is nothing short of cringe worthy. Thao is painfully shy so Walk takes him to visit his macho barber friend to practise the blue collar lingo, thus building his ‘manliness’. Within five minutes Thao is f-ing and blinding like one of the lads, with a confident swagger in his gait, thoroughly transformed from the former introvert whose eyes were consistently glued to his feet.
Gran Torino certainly raises interesting questions, but its clunking didacticism plays like a GCSE RE lesson. Does Walt have to voice every thought out loud? And couldn’t his antagonism towards his neighbours and the catholic priest have been a little less overstated?
Eastwood is compelling, revealing the comic potential of his Dirty Harry persona in snarls and groans, but we are never allowed to scratch far below the surface. In fact, if you watched Eastwood in his previous role as a trainer in Million Dollar Baby, you’ve seen it all before. There his prejudice was women; here it’s foreigners. Similar themes - discrimination, Catholicism, ghosts from the past and love as a redemptive force - are covered in both films.
In spite of its clunkiness, this is still an enjoyable melodrama, and worth seeing for what will almost certainly be the last performance of Eastwood’s acting career.
