Film review: Gran Torino (15)

Published on Friday 13 February 2009 18:19

Director: Clint Eastwood Running time: 116 minutes * * * * *

OVER the years Clint Eastwood has razed towns and stopped rapists and killers and thieves from further stinking up the streets. He's sent himself up, gone into outer space, and starred with a primate twice. He doesn't do middle class. He prefers meat and potatoes storytelling to flashy experiments. He's not afraid of corniness. And his characters will fight to maintain decency in indecent times.

At 78 he's now at the point where each film looks like his final bow. But like Sinatra – or Shirley MacLaine – he keeps coming back. Not this time. Eastwood, who also directed and wrote the music for this movie, has announced that this is his last acting job, although he will continue directing.

Gran Torino takes its title from a vintage car parked in a driveway that belongs to Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), a grizzled Korean War vet who has never been the most sociable of men. When his beloved wife dies, he lives alone in a working-class Detroit neighbourhood, drinking beer and grumbling about the Asians who have taken over the street. The car is a magnet for the local kids and his own grandchildren who wish Walt would hurry up, die and leave it to them.

Thao (Bee Vang), the son of the Laos family who live next door, tries to steal Walt's prized car as part of a gang initiation, but when Walt catches him, the teenager is ordered by his mother to go to work for him. The pensioner makes him help to fix the crumbling eyesore of a house across the road and patch up the street. The two wind up bonding, and Thao's sister Sue (Ahney Her) startles Walt by standing up to his racial slurs and forcing him to see her family as people. She and her family literally drag him to family gatherings, filling him with weird but tasty dishes and ignoring his blunt collection of profane racial epithets (most of them don't speak English).

Eastwood's Walt is a caricature Dotty Harry who glowers and growls like Alf Garnett crossed with a bear. The way Walt rasps "Get off my lawn" it sounds a lot like "Make my day". Everything tees him off: the mealy-mouthed platitudes of a seminary-fresh young priest (Christopher Carley); the self-absorbed granddaughter who text messages throughout the funeral service; and her parents, who let their kids show up for Grandma's funeral in sports tops with bare tummies.

It sounds dreadful but Eastwood's performance is a hoot, provided you avert your ears when Gran Torino grinds its gears in efficient but graceless scenes such as the point where the Artful Codger finally clicks that his conservative outlook and the Laos family's loyal, hardworking values have a lot in common. Or, as he puts it: "I have more in common with these gooks than with my own spoiled-rotten family."

Another oft-repeated idea is that violent ethnic gangs will be too discombobulated by the sight of an angry old white guy to retaliate in an aggressive manner. This may not be Gran Torino's most useful message.

There is a made-in-America pride that runs through this film, with its shots of Clint on his porch in front of an American flag and his Ford Torino; three icons for the price of one shot. The film was, reportedly, not written for Eastwood, but it certainly feels like it. Over the past two decades Eastwood has had a high time poking fun at and genuinely exploring the ageing process with a hefty side of sarcasm. His latest mortality play is not as great as Unforgiven, but it's also not Space Cowboys with its endless line in prostate jokes, or Blood Works where the main vein being tapped appeared to be varicose. However, even the most die-hard Eastwood fan may balk slightly at the closing credits song, where Eastwood duets with jazz troll Jamie Cullum.

Still, if like Walt you can learn to become a tolerant person, you may enjoy Gran Torino as an eccentric mix of violence and violins. This is the story of a man who has little time left and is looking for a respectable exit. The film finds elegance in his attempts to grasp it.