Thao’s family, led by his mouthy, friendly sister, Sue (a very good Ahney Her), forces the teenager to do penance by working for Walt, an arrangement that pleases neither the man nor the boy. Written by a newcomer, Nick Schenk, the story eases into gear with an act of desperation.Under violent threat from some Hmong gangbangers, the next-door neighbor’s teenage son, Thao (Bee Vang), tries and fails to steal Walt’s cherry 1972 Gran Torino, and in the bargain nearly loses his life to its angry, armed owner.
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The world first creeps into his peripheral vision, where a family of Hmong immigrants live in the rundown house next door and then, through a series of unfortunate events, some artful and others creaking with scripted contrivance, it stages a life-altering home invasion. Yet the rest of the world refuses to leave Walt be, despite his best efforts and grimace. Kept at bay, the remaining members of his family including two sons with big houses, big cars, big waistlines have no choice but to let him stew alone. Instead he sits on his front porch chugging can after can of cheap beer in the company of his yellow Labrador, Daisy, watching the world at a safe distance with a squint and a stream of bitter commentary. From his scowl, it looks as if he would like to join her. A former auto worker at Ford, Walt has just put his longtime wife in the ground when the story opens. Eastwood, in his performance as Walt Kowalski, expressively embodies with his usual lack of fuss and a number of growls. Words like flinty and steely come to mind, adjectives that Mr. It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood.
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He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course most obviously in Mr. 44 Magnum did their bit too.ĭirty Harry is back, in a way, in “Gran Torino,” not as a character but as a ghostly presence. Kael also famously branded Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” as “deeply immoral,” even fascistic, but the film became a classic because of its ambiguous engagement with American violence and masculinity. Pauline Kael used to beat up on Stanley Kramer, the director of earnest middlebrow entertainments like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” but at least these movies had a connection to real life or an idea about it. While it’s easy to understand why the last eight years (or the last 50) have made it difficult to sell that idea to the world or even the country, it’s dispiriting that so many movies are disconnected from everyday experience, from economic worries to race.
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Hollywood made movies for export then, of course, but part of what it exported was an idea of America as a democratic ideal, an idea of greatness which, however blinkered and false and occasionally freighted with pessimism, was persuasive simply because Gene Kelly and John Wayne were persuasive.
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Eastwood started as an actor in the old studio system, back when the major movie companies were still in the business of American life rather than just international properties. Eastwood, a man whose vitality as an artist shows no signs of waning, even in a nominally modest effort like “Gran Torino.” Part of this may be generational: Mr. Not because every film is great though, damn, many are but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.įew Americans make movies about this country anymore, other than Mr. I’m not sure how he does it, but I don’t want him to stop.
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This year’s model is “Gran Torino,” a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the U.S.A., in that industrial graveyard called Detroit.
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Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done.