gran torino is really more of a sad, old loser-cruiser!

so clint eastwood’s latest movie has finally reached us in backwoods new brunswick. i’m a huge eastwood fan. unforgiven, million dollar baby and pale rider rank among my favourite movies. so i was really looking forward to seeing the last movie in which eastwood himself will act.

gran torino was touted as a definite contender for oscar nomination. in the end it was pipped to the post. the movie scores an impressive 8.4 at the moment in the internet movie database and rates at 80% in rotten tomatoes! it is clint eastwood’s biggest grossing movie ever in the us and the uk.

i’d like to take a moment, however, to swim against this excremental tide and state categorically that the shame is not that clint missed out on his nomination, but that the movie was ever considered oscar material in the first place! please understand, i am not saying that gran torino isn’t quite as good as critics have made it out to be, or that the eventual nominees just squeezed this great movie out of a deserved shot at oscar immortality; no, i am saying that this movie is utterly appalling, bereft of artistic merit and should be avoided at all cost! i cannot remember a movie for which i had such high expectations, which, upon viewing, i detested so thoroughly.

gran torino focuses on a korean war vet, racist and all-round curmudgeon, walt kowalski (played by eastwood) in the aftermath of his wife’s death. we see walt being challenged in his assumptions and resentments which have accumulated over the years as the neighbourhood has become racially diverse and completely unrecognisable from what it once was.

the movie falls very far short in so many ways. eastwood is renowned for using first-time actors in his movies. in this case, this was a mistake. with the exception of ahney her, who plays sue lor, and some of the hmong cast who do not venture into english, the acting is wooden and awkward. even clint seems in tired form, lapsing into a caricature of himself - or harry callahan! in case we are too dense to pick up on subtleties like the way he pulls a rifle on his neighbours to get them off his lawn, clint helpfully spends the first 30 minutes of the movie literally growling to indicate that he is a rather misanthropic type! (he reminded me of billy connolly’s eponymous performance in the too-often-ignored-but-very-very-funny fido!)

indeed, had the entire movie been played ironically, with tongue firmly in cheek, as a ridiculous comedy, i think it may actually have worked — or at least worked better! the problem is that clint’s ham-fisted directing seems to indicate that he expects us to take this nonsense seriously!

everyone knows that (with very rare exceptions) narration indicates lazy directing. clever directing allows the story to unfold without someone having to tell the audience, “now here’s what just happened…” in gran torino the narration comes in the guise of walt talking to himself. walt’s first encounter with his hmung neighbours quickly shows him that these people are friendly wonderful people. shockingly quickly really! this guy has carefully nurtured his racism since the korean war and has resentfully watched his neighbourhood change from a mono-culture to one of ethnic diversity, where his is one of the few white faces left. yet, after being in his neighbour’s house for a full 5 minutes, walt confesses to the mirror (and so to us in case we missed the import of the previous scene) “i have more in common with these people than i do with my own family”! was it just me, or did anyone else stifle a belly-laugh at this point?

*warning spoiler in the following paragraph*

then there’s that crazy set-piece in the barber’s shop where walt tries to teach his new hmung friend, thao, how to talk to women. the problem is that we’re left laughing at the scene, rather than with it. and the corny ending! john woo is famous for his signature-piece cruciform deaths, indicating a christ-like sacrifice; when clint does it here, it is ridiculous - again, another stifled guffaw!

*spoiler over!*

then there’s the priest! walt has no time for religion and tells the priest as much at the start of the movie. walt repeatedly tells the priest to call him mr. kowalski, yet the priest continually insists on being overly-familiar and calling him walt. this abuse of power is not commented on at all by the movie. were i walt, i would be much more pissed off. at one point, the priest insinuates himself right into walt’s house and starts to paw through his personal photo albums! how presumptuous and obnoxious! i would have loved walt to insist on calling the priest by his christian name, rather than dignifying him with “padre” and for there to have been more of a steep learning curve for this book-learned-but-life-ignorant boy than the movie offers us. eastwood gives a slight nod in this direction by the end, but it is just not enough.

so, we watch walt be miraculously transformed by encountering the other he has irrationally grown to hate over the years. we are left pondering the commonality of the human race, determined to reach out more, fear less and unite the world in a huge hug.

isn’t racism bad people? why can’t we all just get along?

beautifully done clint!

or trite, over-earnest, heavy-handed, wooden, clichéd, badly-directed, poorly-acted, ultimately-racist tripe!

that last one may need a short explanation. the movie clearly purports to be an exposé on racism and an attack on it. however, i am convinced that there is a troubling racism lurking at the movie’s core. note how many times walt uses the word “gook” during the movie. now clearly he is a racist so we would expect no different. note, however, that no character pulls him up on the use of this word, pointing out how deeply offensive it is. walt also throws out racial slurs at some black characters, but he never uses the “n word”.

for me, this is deeply problematic. either walt should have used the “n word”, or he should have been berated for saying “gook” so much. but as neither is the case, we are given the implicit message that it is ok to insult asian people in a way that it is never ok to insult black people.

of course, you may point out that even here, in this review, i have used one derogatory epithet, but only referred to the other. so perhaps i am guilty of the very crime of which i am accusing eastwood. i’m open to your suggestions and comments here.

i realise that i am a lone voice crying in the wilderness (i'm even daring to part ways with mark kermode!) and that this entire diatribe may well fall on deaf ears, but please listen to me and, if you haven’t already seen this movie, save your hard-earned cash! if you want your perspective on racism to be challenged watch missisippi burning, blood diamond, crash, cry freedom, malcolm x, or, or, or, or… but please don’t think this light-weight fluff is worthy to sit with those wonderful movies.

no matter what the masses say, gran torino is really more of a sad, old loser-cruiser!

Comments

[John Wright]

Agree on the acting and direction. Eastwood's an old guy, and maybe doesn't have it within him anymore to insist on quite the caliber of performance from his actors (and himself) as he would in the past. But the content itself is unobjectionable. By the way, it's okay to laugh at the racial terms used in the movie. Seeing an old guy toe to the standards of his day is amusing when compared to today's standards, rather like watching a PSA from the era of Prohibition or reading an early feminist manifesto. It was a part-comedy. I think if you tried to take it too seriously as an "exposé of racism" you might have missed the point. It was basically an often hilarious story about an old man with prejudices and his latter-day adaption to the changes in the modern world. In this sense it needs only to be as good as the kind of western Eastwood may have starred in earlier in his career. Not great, technically, but rather enjoyable nonetheless. (Course, I didn't have any expectations beforehand, so perhaps that helped my review.)

[Janelle Flanagan]

Very interesting blog Shane. Well written. I can definitely see your point-of-view, but I have to lean more with John Wright on this one. I didn't take it as seriously as you did and saw more irony I suppose. I had no expectations and simply saw it as a commentary on Americana and Hollywood in general. I wouldn't go so far as to deter people from watching it though. A movie that causes someone to have such a strong opinion against the norm and brings on this much passion is a movie I'd love to see and decide for myself.