Gran Torino is old school filmmaking telling a new and vital tale, and at the center of it is that face that from efforts both in front of and behind the camera has earned its place as the representation of cinema in our time. It's a face of a movie star in the sense of not being overexposed, much of that value due to how little it gives away. It isn't the face of a man reeking of neediness for our love, it's the face of the man who draws you in due to his reserve.
When we watch Clint, especially those of us who have been watching him since we first snuck into the R-rated Dirty Harry to get our fixin' of righteous body count, we're looking for any clue that might leak from that face, something to tell us what he's feeling and how to feel. He's the ultimate reaction shot, and one little growl or speck of a grimace can send a whole audience into the shared laughter of relief. But whereas the Harry Callahan Clint taught us that might makes right, Eastwood has been steering an increasingly clear course in another direction beginning with his 1992 masterpiece, Unforgiven. While that movie still had the pleasures of violent catharsis to go with the messier moral about killing another human being, Gran Torino, from a spec screenplay by non-Hollywood newcomer Nick Schenk (story by Dave Johannson & Schenk), takes Eastwood's late-career trajectory to a natural conclusion, and makes believable his claim that this will be his last onscreen role.
A friend just asked me if Clint Eastwood is the John Ford of today, and there are two answers to that question. On one hand, yes, Eastwood is carrying on some of the best aspects of the Ford tradition. He makes Westerns, and Gran Torino is nothing if not a "sunset Western" where the sheriff may be retired in a modern day suburban Detroit neighborhood, but he still keeps his rifle clean and ammo close by. Eastwood also shoots simply, like Ford, allowing the actors to fill the screen with life as opposed to overcutting to indicate emotion, the pictorial values being simple but satisfying, and adding some Boyz in the Hood-style slow drifts from passing gang boy cars and similarly sinuous reverses from Walt Kowalski's (Clint's) porch.
Most of all, like Ford, Clint is engaged in America (as Manohla Dargis points out in her perceptive NY Times review). Herein lies the deeper significance of this movie, what gives it such strong resonance through the Archie Bunker-esque comedy as well as Walt's own journey towards peace. What seems very much like the ultimate John McCain movie, with Walt the Korean War vet still carrying around scars for what he did in the name of saving the people he refers to with racial epithets, ends up fitting well into the radically inclusive Barack Obama era.
Without getting into deep spoilers, the picture opens with the funeral of Walt's wife, whom one surmises was the one thing that kept him tethered to humanity. He's eventually forced to connect with his Hmong neighbors, an agrarian hill people who, suitably, were persecuted by the Communists in Southeast Asia. When the local Hmong gang leans on the neighbor's sweet, uncertain son to steal Walt's vintage Gran Torino as his initiation, a mentoring relationship begins, festooned with the politically incorrect language and plenty of lessons on what it really means to be a man.
The ultimate theme is one of passage, a golden years coming of age, with resonance for a nation that will no longer have a white majority by 2060. It is the sacrifice of those stalwart white American, made under our idealistic, pioneering democratic system, that has created the possibility of a similar life for those of far-flung ethnic background. It is history being written as we're watching it.
And, because he understands cinema so well, Clint know that when one gang draws a gun, the other has to draw a bigger one, and that before the lights come up, those guns must be fired.
From beginning to end, the one emotion I felt towards the movie above all others:
Gratitude.
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