Film

Virtually all of Eastwood’s films since Unforgiven can be read as meditations on his image, and Gran Torino plays like a grand summation: His character, the newly widowed Walt Kowalski, is a Korean War veteran (Heartbreak Ridge), a racist vigilante (Dirty Harry) and a reluctant Catholic (Million Dollar Baby); over the closing credits, he even warbles a song (Paint Your Wagon). The film is structured like an urban Western, replete with a kind of in-home prison cell. The story concerns Walt’s growing friendship with Thao (Vang), the Hmong teen neighbor who’s pressured by a gang to steal Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino—judging from the year, a symbol of Eastwood’s heyday, and the literal vehicle through which he’ll pass on his legacy.

Shot after Eastwood’s Changeling took an undue drubbing at Cannes, Gran Torino is, to say the least, a departure from his recent prestige dramas. It’s possible that Eastwood has aimed for the tongue-in-cheek absurdity of The Gauntlet or his Leone films, and that his performance—a nonstop, often hilarious stream of growls and racial epithets—amounts to deliberate self-parody. It’s also possible that Eastwood simply brings consummate craft to a mess of a script, and that there’s no justification for the crude portrayal of Walt’s family or the soon-to-be-famous scene in which Walt teaches Thao “how guys talk.” It’s definitive Eastwood, all right—but here’s a case where auteurism requires digging so deep that one risks losing sight of the surface.