Eastwood's engine stalls in Gran Torino

By Brian Reinhart     1/15/09 6:00pm

Clint Eastwood has suggested to the press that his new drama Gran Torino will be his final acting appearance. But this disorganized disappointment would be an inappropriate finale to Eastwood's brilliant fifty-year career. At its onset, Gran Torino promises to be many things: funny, tense, moving and original. It fails to deliver on every count.Yes, there are many chances for Eastwood (Dirty Harry) to whip out a gun and terrify bad guys in this movie. His character, a crotchety old man named Walt Kowalski, snarls, speaks almost entirely in racial slurs, confronts various thugs, beats up a guy one-third his age and says things like, "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me." But, for the most part, the film substitutes violence for actual drama.

The plot is relatively promising. Walt, a Korea veteran and Detroit native who hates the world and most of the people in it, lives alone and drinks a dozen beers a day. Eventually events force him to overcome his racism and befriend his Hmong neighbors. As a gang of thugs threatens the Hmong family, Walt becomes a father to the neigbors' son Thao, protecting him against the machinations of gang violence in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, Gran Torino is constantly sabotaged by its script, which combines often painfully bad dialog with plot turns that feel false. Walt speaks in clichéd old-man lines like "Kids these days!" and "Get off my lawn." He also has a dog, which allows him to disclose key expository information without sounding like he is simply talking to himself or to the audience. In some scenes, especially one in which Walt and his neighbors' son carry a refrigerator out of Walt's basement, the conversation is so shoddily written that it actually gets in the way of telling the story. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that screenwriter Nick Schenk's only other feature-length film is a comedy called Factory Accident Sex: The Best of Dr. Sphincter, which for some reason went direct to video.

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Schenk did not just have problems writing dialog, unfortunately. His supporting characters tend to be stereotypical, especially Walt's own children and grandchildren, who have moved into posh homes in the suburbs and drive humongous sport utility vehicles. Walt's family becomes largely irrelevant as the film progresses, which is fortunate for Walt and for the average audience member, neither of whom wants to put up with them.

Poorly written dialog and shallow characters do not always destroy a movie, but a bad plot can, and the story in Gran Torino is formulaic and artificial. It is also one fans have seen before. Like Eastwood's character in the classic Unforgiven, Walt is a man with many regrets about his murderous past but called upon to be a fighter again. If only this movie had an ending as good as the one in Unforgiven!

Here, Walt does what the screenplay requires, pushes the correct emotional buttons, but fails completely to give the audience something to think about. And, disrespectfully, the movie lets this cantankerously agnostic character leave the final scene in a puff of superficial religious imagery.

For a plot so blatantly formulaic, there is a great deal of carelessness with the overall structure. It is not just that the apparent change in Walt's religious views is ignored, or that Walt's family is blatantly shoehorned in to give viewers a contrast with the Hmong neighbors, but that the gang violence which provides the hero with an enemy disappears for half of the movie. As soon as the screenplay requires Walt to befriend his neighbors and become a new father figure for the Hmong teenagers, the gun-wielding thugs disappear, letting them socialize in peace. Once the bonds of love are made, the bad guys are allowed back onstage again. Is the audience expected not to see through this?

In the end, Gran Torino is a mess with its heart in the right place. Eastwood directs the scenes with the Hmong family with great tenderness. In fact, the moments Walt shares with them can be poignant and genuinely beautiful. The film is shot on location in Detroit and takes in many of the city's empty lots and abandoned buildings, a metaphor for Walt's own loneliness.

But this story of redemption is poorly told and hardly redemptive. A sadly confused storyline, amateurish actors, stereotypes, clichés and truly terrible dialog mar the entire production. If Eastwood ever makes another movie, he should probably consider writing it himself.

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