Gran Torino

Gran Torino, the latest from the amazingly prolific director Clint Eastwood, is a crowd-pleasing picture, certainly an entertaining time at the movies, but does not provide the kind of depth of his best pictures, such as Unforgiven, Mystic River, or Million Dollar Baby. And though Eastwood gives a fine performance (and a very funny one, oddly enough) it is in no way a stretch for him, and very similar to characters played in Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, or even way back to Dirty Harry.

Set in a Detroit neighborhood that has lost almost all of its white inhabitants, Eastwood stars as a Ford plant retiree and recent widow. He stubbornly will not move out of his decaying and increasingly ethnic diverse neighborhood, evenly though he is casually racist in his comments and demeanor. As we meet him he is recently widowed, not close to his sons or grandchildren, and spends most of his time drinking beer on his front porch.

In the house next door live a Hmong family (an ethnic group that comes from China and Southeast Asia) and he unwillingly gets drawn into strife between the teenage children and a band of thugs. Eastwood, in a kind of pat way, comes to learn to respect these people and forges a relationship with them, and comes to terms with the violence in his past as a Korean War veteran.

Most of the pleasures of this film are in the first two-thirds, as Eastwood's character is shockingly direct. He openly insults the priest (shades of Million Dollar Baby) and openly refers to various ethnic groups by a catalogue of racial slurs. There's also a certain Neanderthal pleasure in watching the crusty old guy get tough with hooligans. For a film that is ostensibly a drama (and ends in tragedy) there are a lot of laughs in this picture. But the transformation of Eastwood's character is just a bit too easy. Are we really to believe that he had, in this day and age, never gotten to known people of another race before? There are racists around everywhere, even in cosmopolitan cities, but this character seems to be racist only because he never actually talked to other people before.

This is Eastwood's picture, but Ahney Her and particularly Bee Vang are good in supporting roles as the kids next door. Vang plays an interesting character, a socially inept momma's boy who resists being recruited into the Hmong gang (his initiation is to try to steal Eastwood's prized 1972 Ford Gran Torin0). While the scenes in which Eastwood comes to take Vang under his wing border on the excessively sentimental, Vang's performance rings true.

When the existence of this film became known a rumor floated around that it was going to be a Dirty Harry picture. The result is not that far off. It has the fun of those pictures, but doesn't have the depth that perhaps Eastwood intended in what may be his swan song (at least as an actor).