Clint Eastwood Finds Salvation in Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that Walt sell his house in a gang-infested corner of suburban Detroit and move to one of those Plasticine retirement homes that in the brochures look ever so nice.

Like a lot of characters Clint Eastwood has played in his six-decade screen career, Walt Kowalski is a man outside of his own time, clinging to a bygone way of life that might never have been quite as he remembers it — a man who senses on some deep, inarticulable level that he has outlived his own usefulness. He’s a little bit of “Dirty” Harry Callahan, brandishing his disgust (and his firearm) at the unsightly blemishes of a value-less society; a little bit of Million Dollar Baby’s Frankie Dunn, the run-down boxing trainer who’s been as much of a disappointment to himself as to his estranged family; and more than a little bit of Unforgiven’s Bill Munny, the has-been gunslinger haunted by the sins of his past but unable to refuse one last ride in the saddle. And much like those movies, Gran Torino — the 29th film Eastwood has directed and the first he has starred in since Million Dollar Baby — is about what happens when circumstance hurls Walt Kowalski into direct conflict with the present.

Don’t tread on me (or my lawn).

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More About

• Clint Eastwood
• Torino
• Walt Kowalski
• Movie Westerns
• Movie Stars

Like Unforgiven, Gran Torino begins with the death of the Eastwood character’s unseen but implicitly saintly wife, after which Walt only has eyes for two things — his faithful canine companion and the gleaming 1972 Ford Gran Torino that sits in his garage, a reminder of the now-defunct assembly line where Walt spent most of his adult life. Back then, the Motor City was a factory town and Walt’s neighborhood an enclave of the sons and daughters of European immigrants. Now, those same streets have been taken over by another immigrant population — the Hmong people of China, Thailand and Laos, who fought on “our” side during the CIA’s Vietnam-era shadow wars, even if, to Walt, they’re no different from the “jabbering gooks” he fought against in Korea. At first, Gran Torino shows us the Hmong exactly as Walt sees them — a nondescript bunch of strange, animal-sacrificing savages just over the fence. And they, for their part, view him with equal suspicion.

As Walt rants about the “zipper heads” dragging down the neighborhood, brushes off the barely postpubescent priest who comes around (on deathbed orders from the late Mrs. Kowalski) to give Walt confession, and growls some more, Gran Torino looks to be shaping up as something of a gently un-PC (Did Clint Eastwood really just say “spooks”?), geriatric crowd-pleaser of the Space Cowboys variety. And if that’s all you want or expect of Gran Torino, then that’s exactly what it will be — no matter that Eastwood, for whom moviemaking has long been symbiotic with his love of jazz, merely uses the bass line of a butt-kicking Clint Eastwood action movie to play a series of complex variations on his career-abiding themes.

Mostly, Gran Torino is a two-hander between Walt and the literal boy next door — an introverted, fatherless Hmong teen, Thao (Bee Vang), who caves to pressure from a gangbanger cousin and tries to steal Walt’s car in a botched initiation rite. Gradually and grudgingly, Walt takes the boy under his wing, takes it upon himself to “man him up” a bit and teach him (in one of the film’s shrewdest, funniest scenes) “how guys talk to each other” — but only after Walt first steps across the property line and into the Hmong world. At its most didactic, Gran Torino has Walt stare into a mirror and realize that he has more in common with these “foreigners” than he does with his own flesh and blood, but more often, the movie works by subtle implication. Where Korea was Walt’s war, Vietnam was the Hmongs’. Both understand that a man who has seen war can never not be that man, and that the kind of absolution Walt Kowalski seeks won’t be found in a confessional.

This is hardly the first time Eastwood has played a man with a shadowy past but rarely have the shadows been so vividly illuminated (no matter the director’s trademark preference for chiaroscuro lighting). “We used to stack fucks like you five feet high in Korea and use you for sandbags,” Walt barks while shoving his old M-1 in the face of one of the gang members who continues to terrorize Thao’s family — a moment (one of the finest Eastwood has ever acted) that echoes the image of the Iwo Jima survivor stirred from a nightmare at the start of Flags of Our Fathers. Only, Walt Kowalski is wide awake, and the nightmare is still unfolding.