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One of Clint Eastwood’s more satisfying late-career films, Gran Torino wholeheartedly embraces its own clichés, and ransacks them with a deceptively playful edge. It’s a film about multiculturalism with an almost unique honesty, picturing the modern blue-collar suburb as infected by false divides, described with a certain caricatured accuracy. Picturing taciturn American manliness as both endangered and eternal, Gran Torino avoids the ponderous pretentiousness that has afflicted much of Eastwood’s recent work, constantly undercut by unsubtlety and melodrama; Torino knows it’s transparent, and plays it up from when it first introduces Eastwood growling in Dickensian obviousness at his Laotian neighbours and being pestered by his goth-ish but materialist granddaughter for his car once he dies, which ought to be soon. She might as well wear a sign that say “ungrateful modern brat”. Like his most notable hero, “Dirty” Harry Callahan, Eastwood’s Kowalski trades in an insulting argot that conceals a strange mixture of all-purpose misanthropy and conscientiousness, free to face down a gang of African-American bullies but also dismissing one of their near-victims as an ofay dipshit he doesn’t blame them for wanting to slap up.
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The film is built around the distance between modes of communication and the actuality of relationships, most comically and absurdly illustrated when Eastwood teaches his young Asian charge to talk like a man, that is, in offhand insults and epithets, as the gateway to how men relate, testing each-other’s mettle even whilst establishing common worries. It’s a legitimate, and accurate, observation that multiculturalism in the working-class world tends to develop in ways that would inevitably horrify the sophomore student and the bourgeois liberal.
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The story wades into interesting territory in explicitly contrasting the decay of the manufacturing working class with military intervention in foreign countries and blowback of those wars. Finally, the film doesn’t really interrogate that relationship, or the nature of patriarchal masculinity as a failed bulwark against social decline, or recognise the quiet but crucial contradiction in the tale’s essential notion that civility is necessary but too often absent, whilst nakedly enjoying the rants of someone who can’t be bothered with it anymore; but it does suggest how affectations of civility can be used as a weapon to enforce situations on the weaker party. There’s a weak stab at sacrificial transcendence in the finale. It’s still an engaging work. Likable supporting performances from Bee Vang and Ahney Her help enormously.
