A cranky avenger
haunted by guilt
Clint Eastwood dominates in Gran Torino, says
Andrew M Brown
20 February 2009

Eastwood plays Korean war veteran Walt Kowalski

Gran Torino represents the interment of Clint Eastwood's avenging angel character - "Dirty" Harry Callahan, or the Man with No Name. The plot is conventional - outsider rescues a community from oppression by a gang of outlaws - but Eastwood's presence, his toughness and his age (he is nearly 80) give it the quality of a fable.

The community under threat here is composed of Hmong immigrants. They came as refugees to the United States from south-east Asia where they supported America in the Vietnam War. They are portrayed as humble people who have retained their customs and language. Young Hmong males, however, tend to go off the rails and join gangs.

The Hmongs in Gran Torino have colonised a suburb of Detroit formerly occupied by Polish automobile workers. These natives have dispersed - except, that is, for one remaining outpost of aggressive Americanism in the person of Korean war veteran Walt Kowalski (Eastwood).

An American flag hangs prominently outside Walt's house and in the driveway sits his prized possession: a 1972 Ford Gran Torino. Walt, who spent 50 years at Ford, installed the Gran Torino's steering column himself. He is happy to spend his retirement contemplating the car's highly buffed flanks while sitting on his porch sipping a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking. From time to time he growls racist abuse at the old Hmong lady who sits on the next-door porch. She, in turn, calls him an "old rooster" in Hmong.

We see Walt's isolation when we first meet him in church, together with his selfish, upwardly mobile sons and their gawky teenage brats, for the funeral of his wife, Dorothy. The camera focuses on the multiple creases of Walt's face as he bunches it up with revulsion at the sight of his granddaughter's pierced belly button.

The young priest, Fr Janovich (Christopher Carley), irritates Walt further. He has pink, babyish cheeks and curly orange hair and bears a resemblance to the young Spencer Tracy. He preaches a glib homily on life and death.

At lunch back at Walt's house Fr Janovich urges Walt to go to Confession: it was his wife's last wish. Walt is having none of it. In fact, he goes out of his way to hurt the priest's feelings, telling him: "I think you're an over-educated, 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of old ladies and promise them eternity."

Fr Janovich persists, to his great credit. It is one of the many appealing aspects of Gran Torino that the priest, who likes to wear a button-down shirt and blazer as often as he can, is shown to be living the Gospel in a meaningful way, not by bossing people about but by taking action himself and showing courage. What a delight it is to see a Catholic priest in a Hollywood movie who's neither sinister nor having a crisis of faith, but is a good man trying to care for his flock.

In the end he persuades Walt to make a confession, though it's a perfunctory effort. Walt has never been one for church and he will redeem himself in his own way.

A crisis forces Walt to deal with his detested neighbours. Adolescent Hmong "gang-bangers", who cruise the neighbourhood in an all-white Honda customised with a giant rear spoiler, start picking on a teenage boy, Thao (Bee Vang). Thao lives next door to Walt, with his sister, mother and grandmother (the lady who calls Walt a rooster).

The gang-bangers bully Thao into stealing the Gran Torino. Walt, of course, is seldom far from his carefully maintained M1 army rifle. He easily scares Thao away, and, more importantly, he gets rid of the gang for the time being.

As a result, he earns the gratitude of the Hmong community who shower him with exotic foods, plants and flowers. Walt still calls them "gooks", "slopes" and "zipper-heads", but I never felt in any doubt that he would eventually see the goodness of these alien folk. He is cranky and xenophobic, but there's no real nastiness in him.

To heal the offence caused by the attempted theft of the car, Thao's family insist that Walt accept Thao as an unpaid handyman. Walt, predictably, protests and then gives in. He puts Thao to work repairing drooping eaves and tidying up gardens and teaches him how to use a wrench. Walt's lessons in manliness involve an amusing exchange of macho insults with Martin the barber, played by the always-appealing John Carroll Lynch. Walt develops a protective, fatherly relationship with the boy of the kind that he couldn't manage with his real sons. In fact, his son Mitch (Brian Haley) and daughter-in-law Karen (Geraldine Hughes) are only interested in getting him into a retirement home.

Touched by his friendship with Thao and his neighbours' relentless hospitality, Walt experiences an epiphany. A Hmong witch-doctor buttonholes him and discerns his inner turmoil - in particular, that Walt is corroded by guilt over the men he killed in Korea. Walt admits: "I have more in common with these gooks than I have with my own spoiled, rotten family."

Naturally, the gangsters return to threaten the lives of Walt's new-found friends. Walt's laconic confrontations with them contain obvious echoes of the Dirty Harry series. As if in a concession to his age Eastwood often points just an imaginary gun, his finger, at the villains, but this succeeds in scaring them. Some of the cast fail to convince. Several are first-time actors, and while Thao benefits from his naivety, the baddies in the Honda lack menace.

That these shortcomings don't spoil the picture is a sign of how dominated Gran Torino is by its star (Eastwood even sings over the end credits). Walt must vanquish the gangsters but cannot repeat the violence that haunts him. So Walt repents, though not as his wife or Fr Janovich intended, and Eastwood brings a dramatic ending to Dirty Harry.