Take a Ride

Gran Torino

by Sam Adams

Recommended

Clint Eastwood is at a point in his career when he can do whatever he damn well pleases, and a stage of his life where he's inclined to do so. In recent years, he has been cranking out movies at a pace that would faze many a younger man, and of a scope and scale more ambitious than ever. It's barely been two months since his last effort, Changeling, arrived in theaters (although it premièred in May) and already Eastwood is back on the screen, in person this time.

Eastwood announced that the role of Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino will be his last, and he's left us a doozy to remember him by. A grizzled veteran of the Korean War and the Detroit auto plants, Walt lives in a dilapidated Detroit neighborhood, the last holdout against white flight, with the chip on his shoulder to prove it. Eastwood's cowboys once roamed the frontier, but now he has been passed by. Surrounded by Hmong immigrants, Walt acts as if he's still guarding the 38th parallel, casually dropping racial slurs and scowling at the family next door, including shy Thao (Bee Vang) and his brassy sister, Sue (Ahney Her).

Recently widowed, an event that provokes less overt emotion than the visible navel ring his granddaughter wears to the funeral, Walt sits on his front porch with a cooler of beer and watches his world go to hell, his lips curling in a feral snarl. On the page, the character might have read as an embittered racist, but Eastwood turns him into a comic exaggeration, a step away from a lovable crank. It is a fraught calculation.

While Thao tries to dodge the local toughs who want to press him into their gang, Sue fearlessly strides up Walt's porch, matching him insult for insult until a grudging mutual respect is formed. Eventually, Thao is forced into Walt's orbit, after he gets caught trying to steal Walt's prized Ford Gran Torino and is apprenticed to him by way of penance. Walt takes pleasure at first into forcing him into menial tasks, but he starts to take an interest in the boy, more than in his own distant sons.

Gran Torino takes an abrupt and not entirely successful swerve in tone near its end, one that is difficult to square with its essentially comic early movements. But whether or not the movie's two parts square, they're exactly as Clint wants them.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Gran Torino | Directed by Clint Eastwood | A Warner Bros. release