Clint Eastwood Finds Salvation in Gran Torino

Unlike most contemporary Hollywood and Hollywood-style filmmakers, Eastwood (here working from a generally superb script by newcomer Nick Schenk) isn’t naive or reductive enough to suggest that the solution to deeply embedded conflicts between races, classes or entire social orders is a mere car crash (or Brecht poem) away; that if we just sat down and talked to each other, we’d be able to dissolve all that stands between us. An unmitigated social realist (who would never be so obvious as to make an overtly social-realist movie), Eastwood understands that the only real “change” in people and societies amasses infinitesimally, through hard-gotten experience, and that some things in life are destined to remain immutable.

“The thing that haunts a man most is what he isn’t ordered to do,” Walt says in Gran Torino’s defining scene, and the thing that haunts Eastwood — has haunted him for the better part of his filmmaking career — is the legacy of American violence and the false heroic myths on which that legacy has been written. For him, romanticized movie violence long ago lost its allure, and at least since Unforgiven, the act of killing another human being has been depicted as one that puts a knot in men’s stomachs and leaves a permanent scar on their pscyhes. In Gran Torino, that strain of investigation reaches its apotheosis in an inversion of Unforgiven’s climactic barroom standoff, a scene that brings the curtain down on Eastwood’s cycle of urban crime films as hauntingly as the earlier one did on his Westerns. (“Extraordinary events culminate in what may seem to be an anti-climax,” a Hmong shaman advises Walt early in the film. He doesn’t know the half of it.)

Don’t tread on me (or my lawn).

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More About

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

I’m not sure if Gran Torino is Eastwood’s “best” film, to whatever extent such trivial distinctions matter. Certainly, it’s a rougher, less formally elegant one than the masterly Unforgiven and A Perfect World. But especially when viewed in light of this year’s earlier Changeling (which, on the surface, looks like the more “important” movie), it seems like one of Eastwood’s most personal, right down to his raspy warbling of the self-penned end-credits song. Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell. “That,” future generations of fathers will someday tell their sons, “is what Clint Eastwood was all about.”

GRAN TORINO | Directed by CLINT EASTWOOD | Written by NICK SCHENK, from a story by DAVE JOHANSSON and SCHENK | Produced by EASTWOOD, ROBERT LORENZ and BILL GERBER | Released by Warner Bros. | ArcLight Hollywood, AMC Century City, Mann Criterion