The heightened awareness of ones mortality that accompanies age is bringing out the best in Clint Eastwood. If you haven’t seen his latest offering, Gran Torino, then make sure you do before it (and he) rolls off into the sunset for good. The film takes its title from the 1972 grunt machine Ford of the same name – a vehicle that Clint’s character Walt Kowalski helped build when he worked the Detroit assembly line. Walt recalls how he fitted the steering wheel of his own Gran Torino – his last tenuous link with an America that no longer exists.
Now the glory days are over; for Walt, for Detroit’s famous auto industry, and more worryingly – for the entire neighbourhood. Only Daisy his faithful labrador is any solace to the recently widowed Walt as he rails against the Asian invasion of his suburb. His neat lawn, painted house and defiant Stars and Stripes are about the sum total of his world now – with confusion, babble (in the form of his Hmong neighbours Indo-Chinese language) and the lawlessness of gun-toting gangs encroaching on all sides. And it’s not as if his sons and their families help ease the pain – if anything their Toyota driving habits and their variously pierced offspring sum up the malaise that has overtaken the world. His two fleshy soft-handed sons stand in direct contrast to the gnarly Korean War veteran whose shed contains every tool conceivable – a recall of the days when if something broke you fixed it rather than replaced it. Even religion is getting on his goat in the guise of the youthful, virginal and over-trained padre who, at his dead wife’s orders, checks up on him from time to time.
Things change when Walt comes to the aid of his Hmong neighbours when a young man from the family is pressured into joining a local Asian gang – a bunch of armed misfits who drive around in a “doof-doof” Japanese import that is all action and no torque. When the young boy attempts to steal the beloved Gran Torino in order to be accepted in the gang, or at least to get them off his back, Walt scares him off. With nothing to show for his endeavours the gang turns up again, only they make the mistake of taking the fight onto Walt’s lawn. Think Dirty Harry with a few more wrinkles, a little less hair and a 1952 rifle. Time may have mellowed Clint, but the look he can give you down the barrel of a gun is as chilling as ever. The upshot of it is that he is inundated with gifts from the local Hmong community, who are sick of the gangs dictating terms. His neigbours, in particular their daughter, befriend Walt, and when the would-be-thief is ordered to pay Walt back in gardening and house keeping duties Walt decides to take him on as a project.
It all sounds nice. Nice and nice. But if there is one thing we know about Eastwood movies, and this is no exception, calm exists only in order for the breaking of it to appear all the more shocking. If 1994’s Unforgiven was Clint’s revision of all those spaghetti westerns, then Gran Torino is the revised, stripped down, and ultimately more realistic Dirty Harry. Foolhardy villians might have made Harry’s days, but the complexities of today’s urban underclass mean that the odds are stacked against Walt. He may have a legal arsenal of weaponry, but the only time a gun goes off in his hands is by accident.
Which leads me to this: the final scenes of the movie are trim, taut and terrific. For those of us with a Christian worldview the redemptive overtones are sobering and challenging. I’m not going to give anything away, suffice to say, Eastwood overturns our expectations completely. Right up until the denouement I was left guessing. The final scene of the movie as the credits roll sees the Gran Torino cruising up the coast with a haunting ballad being gently sung by Eastwood himself in the background. The cracked voice has an age and weariness to it that reminds us that, like the Torino, they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore, and that no matter how many nihilistic westerns the Coen brothers churn out, Clint’s movies are classic vehicles in their own right.
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