“God, I’ve got more in common with these gooks than I do my own spoiled-rotten family.”

Plot summary: A racist white man protects his Hmong neighbors from a local gang.

Review:

Early in 2008 Eastwood released Changeling, a dreadfully overlong stinker whose hack direction displays an amazing fidelity to melodramatic cliché. The film has, among other things, missing/murdered children; a demented, ax-murderer/serial killer; unjust incarceration inside an insane asylum run by “evil” authoritarians itching to administer a little of the old shock therapy treatment; courtroom drama climaxing with the comeuppance of the villains; a crusading reverend (played by John Malcovich!) battling police corruption; and enough false endings to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Plus, it stars Angelina Jolie, woefully miscast as a frumpy working-class mom from the 1920’s, who baits Oscar with a lot of weeping and screaming. In one scene, the serial killer says his car is “overheated”, an adjective that just as easily could be applied to the film itself. I went into Gran Torino rather more optimistic, figuring it couldn’t possibly be as bad as Changeling. Alas, it was worse, giving Eastwood the distinction of having directed two of the worst movies of the year.

In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays cantankerous Walt Kowalski, a recently widowed, racist Korean War vet who happens to be the lone white holdout among an ever-growing community of Hmong immigrants living in a rundown working-class Detroit neighborhood. Too obstinate to move elsewhere, he defiantly sits on his porch drinking beer and growling racial epithets at his Asian neighbors, leaping (or, given his advanced age, shuffling) into action only when he has to, say, force trespassers off his property at gunpoint (”get off my lawn” is the latest, but not the greatest, Eastwoodian catchphrase). Packing heat like Dirty Harry and hurling epithets like Archie Bunker, Walt, who just wants to be left the fuck alone with his cheap beer, his trusty dog and his prized Gran Torino, quickly expels all would-be visitors from his premises, not just “gooks” with the bad sense to wander onto his property, but also his estranged son (who misguidedly suggests that Walt move into an old folk’s home) and a priest who keeps pestering Walt to confess his sins. It was around the time the priest showed up when I first started squirming in my seat, hoping that Eastwood would not take the film in the hackneyed direction it appeared to be heading, but fearing that he would anyway. And, of course, he does, for a priest hovering around an Eastwood movie can mean only one thing: Redemption.

With all the ingredients for redemption securely in place, the hoary old clichés start piling up with alarming predictability. Walt, the unabashed racist, discovers tolerance in his heart and befriends his Asian neighbors, learning that he has far more in common with them than he thought. Walt, the neglectful father, becomes father figure to the fatherless Hmong boy next door (all the more admirable considering the boy had earlier tried to steal his beloved Torino), acting as the boy’s advisor, protector and, strangely, match-maker, all because, in a risible bit of shorthand character development, Walt saw the boy lend a helping hand to a neighbor. Walt, the unrepentant sinner, gains salvation, in a scene preordained from the start, by finally confessing his sins to that pesky priest. Finally, Walt, the selfish bastard, performs an act of supreme self-sacrifice, giving up his life for the sake of his new surrogate Hmong family and dying a martyr (never mind that he’s already terminally ill), redeemed and ready to enter His House justified, with arms outstretched, crucifixion-style. With his character’s transfiguration into a Christ figure, Eastwood’s ludicrous deification of his Dirty Harry persona is complete.* (Pauline Kael must be rolling in her grave).

Not a moment of this is remotely believable, of course, and it’s particularly disheartening that Eastwood, after 40 years of making movies, could bring himself to direct such self-important nonsense with a straight face. Awkwardly stuck somewhere between woefully unfunny self-parodying comedy and risibly overblown redemption drama, Eastwood’s intellectually vacant, emotionally empty and dramatically phony film (which could be re-titled: Gran Torino or: How I Learned to Stop Slurring and Love the Hmong) was the most depressing movie-going experience I had in 2008. The closing credits, which feature Eastwood himself rasping some maudlin song about him and his Gran Torino, tops it off, proving that he can hit as many false notes with his singing as he can with his filmmaking.

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*Of course, Dirty Harry is not the only old Eastwood character Walt resembles. There’s a little Will Muny in him too. When the boy (Bee Vang, who gives perhaps the most inept performance of the year) asks Walt what it was like to kill a man, Walt solemnly intones, “You don’t want to know”, which echoes Muny’s “it’s a helluva thing killing a man” moment. Thus, despite all Walt’s racist slurs against Asians, we know he’s a-hurtin’ deep down inside, haunted by killing all those “gooks” in Korea.

Posted on January 17th, 2009 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews