Movie Review: Gran Torino

I saw, for the first time in a long time, a movie that was not only worth watching, but possibly even worth buying: Gran Torino, starring the improbably cast Clint Eastwood as the main character, Walt Kowalski. The movie is a real gem, complete with a reasonably decent religious element, a total lack of sexual scenes, and a tale of the ultimate sacrifice. The language is less than stellar, I’ll admit, and includes repeated violations of the Second Commandment, but overall the movie is quite clean. This review may (read: “will”) contain spoilers, so if you care about that sort of thing, wait until you’ve seen the movie. Otherwise, read on.

I’m not a Clint Eastwood fan. When it comes to Clint Eastwood’s real trademark genre, the western, it’s been done better and more often by a number of others, most notably the redoubtable and invincible Duke himself, John Wayne. Tom Selleck and others have also done very credible westerns; even Val Kilmer, as an incredibly well-played Doc Holiday in Tombstone, has my western allegiance before Clint Eastwood, whose westerns I’ve never found more than mildly entertaining, and often downright tedious. (The final duel in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was not suspenseful; it was boring. See the final duel in, for example, Quigley Down Under, Selleck’s western masterpiece, or that of John Wayne in his long-overdue Oscar performance in True Grit, for better examples.) I’ve never seen his cop movies (no, not even Dirty Harry), so I can’t speak for them. But overall, of what I know of him, Clint Eastwood is far from being a favorite actor for me.

Still, he nailed this performance, and really made the movie by it.

Eastwood stars, as mentioned previously, as Walt Kowalski, a retired Ford autoworker living in what appears to be Detroit in a once predominantly Polish neighborhood now occupied almost entirely by himself, a white lady across the street, and Hmong immigrants. The Hmong---”Humong,” as Kowalski pronounces it early on---are totally alien to Kowalski, and he’s not particularly fond of them. (Nor are they of him, for that matter.) Furthermore, Kowalski is a Korean war veteran, and therefore sees all those of East Asian extraction as Chinese soldiers trying their hardest to kill him and his friends. He neither trusts nor likes them on sight. To be fair, he neither trusts nor likes anyone on sight, but the movie starts out making it absolutely clear that Kowalski is an unreconstructed racist.

It’s not just East Asians, either. (I don’t like the simple word “Asian.” Indians, Pakistanis, Siberian Russians are Asian, but they’re not what we’re usually talking about when we say “Asian.” What I’m trying to talk about here are those of East Asian race, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hmong, Vietnamese, and so on. I’m not talking about the inhabitants of a particular continent, just a single part of that continent.) Kowalski appears to be racist against everybody: blacks, Jews, Italians, and Irish are routinely referred to by racial or ethnic epithets. The movie is trying to set Kowalski up as a jerk, just a mean, hateful old man that nobody likes, and for good reason. And it does a pretty good job of that.

The opening scene is the funeral of Kowalski’s dear wife, Dorothy, whom he clearly loved very deeply. Kowalski, being Polish, is of course a Catholic, and Father Janovich (who is an important character) gives a typical Novus Ordo “bitter-sweet” death sermon which Kowalski clearly finds grating. Standing beside his wife’s coffin, preparing to put her body into the ground, we see Kowalski’s two sons approach with their families. Mitch and Steve Kowalski are disappointments to Walt; he doesn’t understand them and doesn’t relate well to them. For this reason, they treat him with contempt that is open to all but Walt, though Walt himself is certainly aware of it. One of his granddaughters comes into the church with her midriff bare, a belly-button ring exposed; this visibly displeases Walt, prompting the two sons to exchange some derisive words about their father being “stuck in the 50s.” After the funeral, we see more of this uncomfortable relationship between Walt and his sons: disappointment on Walt’s side, clear contempt on the sons’. Walt clearly disapproves also of his sons’ raising of their children, most especially of his oldest granddaughter.

At one point during the funeral, Walt goes downstairs to get some chairs. (To his credit, Mitch offers to do it for him; Walt replies that he needs them now, not later that week.) In the basement, he has a great many keepsakes, including his footlocker from the Korean war. His grandsons are digging through it, looking at his things, finding a few pictures of Walt with his unit along with a silver star, the story behind which we don’t learn until much later. It’s clear, however, that Walt was not only a veteran, but a combat veteran of some distinction.

Walt later goes into his garage, where we first lay eyes on his prize possession, from which the movie takes its name: a 1972 Gran Torino. He later tells another character that he put the steering column in the vehicle with his own hands. His granddaughter, Ashley, is out looking at it, congratulates him on his “bitchin’” car, and then bluntly and unapologetically asks what he intends to do with it when he dies, all but asking him for it. He refuses to respond, simply walking out, clearly (and rightly) disgusted with his descendents in general and Ashley in particular.

Also at the funeral, a movie-long relationship with Father Janovich begins. The priest, a very young man (honestly; I’ve got a baby face myself, but this kid looks about twelve years old), gives his condolences and tells Walt that Dorothy had asked him to look after Walt after she died. Walt is disdainful, informs Father Janovich that he’d only ever gone to church because Dorothy wanted it, and had no intentions of keeping up a relationship with the priest. Father Janovich tells him that he promised and intends to keep the promise. Walt is again disdainful, makes a wisecrack, and walks away.

Shortly, however, we see that the young Hmong man next door, Thao (pronounced “Tao”), is being pressured to join a Hmong gang, to protect him from the various other gangs whose territories border the fast-deteriorating neighborhood. This gang involves Thao’s cousin. He finally succumbs, and is given his task for entry into the gang: stealing Walt Kowalski’s 1972 Gran Torino. Thao gets as far as the garage; he’s then confronted by Walt pointing a very large and very operational M1 Garand directly at his face. Walt is clearly enraged, and as Thao backs up, Walt pursues. However, Walt trips, the gun goes off and hits a Pabst sign hanging in the garage, and Thao manages to escape. It was dark, so Walt didn’t recognize Thao, nor did he call the police. But he does get a better lock for his garage.

The next night, Thao refuses to continue pursuing gang membership, and the gang begins to beat him up. Thao’s sister, Sue, protests loudly, but to no avail. Walt hears the commotion, which is spilling over onto his lawn, and marches out again with his M1 Garand, facing down the gangbangers and sending them away. At one point he tells them, “We used to stack punks like you five high in Korea; use you for sandbags.” The Lor family, to which Sue and Thao belong, are intensely grateful, and the Hmong throughout the neighborhood begin bringing gifts to Walt, much to his chagrin, since his only aim in coming out at all was to get the dispute out of his lawn. When asked what they can do to thank him, Walt tells Sue (she and Thao are the only English-speaking members of the family) “Just get out of my lawn” and “leave me alone.” Sue and Thao, for their part, listen.

However, the Lor family learns that Thao had tried to steal from Walt, and in shame they approach him with Sue as their translator. Sue tells the irritated Walt that Thao had disgraced the family and needed to make it right. Thus, they offered Thao in essentially slave labor for a period of weeks. After repeated refusals, and Sue explaining several times that refusing would only further disgrace the family, Walt accepts. He tells Thao to count the birds in the tree outside his house and walks back in to read his paper.

Throughout the movie, we see Walt occasionally coughing up blood. (There’s a rather amusing scene when he goes to the doctor and a female East Asian comes in to discuss his chart. He asks what happened to his regular doctor, giving a German name; the East Asian woman explains that that doctor had retired three years ago, and she was his replacement, Dr. Chu.) It becomes clear that he’s not healthy and will probably be joining his wife soon; however, this fact is kept distant throughout the movie, and Walt never becomes fatalistic or otherwise melancholy about it, with one exception that in the long run is rather unimportant.

Thao protests at this useless “work” the next day, telling Walt that as long as he was going to be working, he should at least be doing something useful. Walt agrees and sets Thao to work fixing up houses around the neighborhood. After a few days of this, Walt begins to like Thao, who appears to be an honest and hard-working individual, values that Walt holds very dear. He even opens up to Thao at one point about his sons, telling Thao how frustrated he is with them. “I worked fifty years in a Ford plant,” he says, “and my son is selling Toyotas.” Walt really takes Thao under his wing, finding him a job with a local construction site, providing him with an initial set of tools at Walt’s own expense, and otherwise teaching him the skills and values that Walt holds dear. Thao, in other words, becomes a surrogate son, a chance for Walt to do right what he had done wrong with Mitch and Steve.

Meanwhile, Sue Lor is also developing as a character, one of whom Walt is becoming equally fond. He sees Sue walking down a street in a bad neighborhood, being confronted by some gangbangers with some obviously bad intentions. He takes the pistol that he apparently carries with him at all times, faces down the gangbangers, tells Sue to get in the truck, gives the gangbangers some hard words (some of which are, indeed, racist), and then drives away. He tells Sue how stupid she was to be walking in that neighborhood. Sue, for her part, begins to tell him a little about her people, the Hmong, and by the time he gets her home he says, “You’re not bad, kid.” Coming from Walt Kowalski, that’s high praise.

Slowly, Walt gets to know and respect the Hmong. At one point, he has to leave a barbecue with them to go to the bathroom to cough up some blood; he looks in the mirror and says, “I can’t believe this. I have more in common with these people than I do with my own sons.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that while Walt talks like a racist, he doesn’t act like one, and therefore isn’t really one. He likes and respects people not based on their race---he is quite contemptuous of his sons, despite their being Polish whites like himself, yet likes and respect Thao, despite his being a Hmong---but on their honesty, their work ethic, and their courage.

The Hmong gangbangers from the beginning, however, are not gone. They beat up Thao on his way back from his job; Walt beats one of them up and threatens him with a pistol, telling him that further trouble with Thao would cause further trouble. The gang then does a drive-by shooting of Thao’s home; Thao is nicked, but everyone is otherwise fine, though Sue was missing for several hours. When she finally returns home, she’s been brutally beaten and apparently raped. Thao is filled with a brother’s rage at this violation of his sister, and he asks Walt for help seeking revenge. Walt tells him to return to the home later, and at that time they would avenge Sue Lor.

While Thao is gone, Walt gets a haircut and a shave; gets fitted for a suit (“I’ve never had a fitted suit before”), and takes his dog to the Lors’ home, leaving her there. He’s quite clearly preparing for death. Most importantly, though, he goes to confession to Father Janovich, to whom he’s stated several times throughout the movie that he would never go to confession. Father Janovich hears his confession, which consists of failing to pay the tax on a $900 profit (“it’s just the same as stealing”) and failing to have a good relationship with his sons. Having expected more, due to earlier conversations, Father Janovich says, “That’s it?” Incensed, Walt replies, “That’s it? It’s bothered me most of my life!” He is then given absolution and leaves.

The confession scene is critical, because in it we find out directly what Walt’s true character, revealed indirectly for the whole movie, really is. In short, we find out that he’s really a good man. The movie started out by convincing us that Walt was a dirty old racist with nothing better to do than read the paper on his porch and wax his Gran Torino. But here he is, and the only bad things he can think of to confess was a few dozen dollars in tax fraud and not keeping a good enough relationship with his sons. True, if Father Janovich were a real confessor, he would certainly have probed more about further sins Walt was neglecting. But the bottom line is that Walt has led a good life; he’d served his country, married, raised his family, worked hard, maintained his property, and dealt honestly with everyone he knew. And now he was about to deal more honestly than ever before, finally giving what he’d risked for his country so many years before.

When Thao comes back to the house, Walt has his Garand and his pistol out on the table. Thao asks which one is his, and Walt takes him down to the basement.

“How many men have you killed?” Thao asks him. “Thirteen, maybe more.” “What’s it like?” Walt visibly grimaces. “You don’t want to know.” Walt then explains how he’d gotten his silver star. A Chinese machine gun nest had been harassing his unit, and Walt and several other men had been dispatched to take it out. Walt was the only man to return alive. At the end, the gunner had surrendered; Walt had shot him in the face with his Garand anyway. It had haunted him, he said, his entire life. (Presumably, he’d confessed that at some previous confession.) Walt tells Thao that he never wanted the boy to experience what it was like to kill another human being. He walked upstairs, locked Thao in the basement, and proceeded to the gangbanger’s house by himself.

He approaches at nightfall. We’re all braced for a big shoot-’em-up. The gangbangers come out and draw down on him. Walt rebukes them for their deed, expressing particular disgust that they had not only raped a woman, but raped one of their own blood. (Sue and Thao’s cousin was a member of the gang.) He uses his finger as a mock pistol, shooting at each of them. He then puts a cigarette in his mouth and asks if any of them have a light. He says, “I have a light. I’m going to get one.” He puts his hand in his pocket---and the gangbangers open up. Walt is shot more times than we can count, and he falls to the ground before he can even get his gun from under his coat.

On the ground, his hand falls from his coat. There’s no gun in it---just a lighter. He really was reaching for a light.

The commotion, though, had brought lots of people outside, all of whom were watching when Walt was murdered. The police arrest the gang members and are confident that they can get a conviction. Walt is dead; but he gave his life to protect Thao, Sue, and all the other Hmong that he’d come to respect and love. Walt is not only a good man; he’s a great man. “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

At the reading of his will, Walt leaves his house to the church, “because Dorothy would have liked it.” His sons roll their eyes, clearly irritated; Thao sits quietly and respectfully in the corner, away from the family. Really, though, Thao is Walt’s family now, and that becomes perfectly clear. While Ashley Kowalski sits expectantly, obviously expecting the Gran Torino to be left to her, Walt leaves it to Thao Lor, who accepts it gratefully, and the movie ends happily ever after.

In the end, Walt’s a bit of a jerk. He says mean things to people, insulting their races and their cultures. (To be fair, he takes it as well as he dishes it out; many of his friends mock this old “dumb Polack,” and he’s perfectly happy to receive this mocking.) But in the end, he’s an honest man, a fair man, who respects anyone who deserves his respect, without regard to their race or ethnicity. He’s changed the lives of Thao, of Sue, and of the Lor family forever for the good. And he gave his very life for them, something that no one should ever hold lightly.

A movie well worth watching, and probably even worth buying. At over 3000 words, this review is already absurdly long, so I’ll end at that.

Praise be to Christ the King!