..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Gran Torino
Directed by Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood plays a Dirty Harry grown old in his latest movie Gran Torino. And he makes us feel lucky ... to be watching him simmer and explode on screen again.

It’s been four years since Eastwood last played before the camera, as the gruff fight trainer/manager in his heart-breaking Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby. And though he’s greatly enhanced his directorial credentials then -- with a run of gems like Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima -- it’s refreshing to see him trotting out his scowl, his squint and his nasty disposition.

The real Clint is a gentler, more thoughtful character than Harry or Philo or The Man With No Name or or any of his other noir or western creations. But on screen he still seems to relish playing his counterpart, a male fantasy figure, by his own description. That’s what Gran Torino‘s Walt Kowalski is -- though with a difference.

Walt, a Korean War veteran and Ford assembly plant retiree, is a seventy-something Detroit suburbanite, who has few friends, only the obnoxious family members left, and the same foul-mouthed and slow-fuse but deadly temper that old ‘70s antihero detective Harry Callahan had. Walt, who views the world though a grimace, is playing out his last chapter after his returment from Ford (after a half century) and though he‘s the neighborhood grouch in an increasingly Asian community, he becomes involved, at first almost against his will, in the problems of the immigrant Asian (Hmong, or Laos or Thailand mountain people) family next door.

These include an irascible granny, some worried parents, and the Lor family teenagers, troubled Thao (Bee Vang) and lively Sue (Ahney Her), two kids who are both being harassed and/or courted by the local Hmong gangbangers -- and who cross paths sharply with Walt when those local thugs chivvy Thoa into trying to steal Walt’s precious, beautifully preserved 1972 Gran Torino. Walt, who has as big a repertoire of racial epithets as Harry’s, observes it all and eventually gets into the action just as Humphrey Bogart’s Harry Morgan did in To Have and Have Not -- because he “likes you and (he) doesn’t like them.”

Increasingly, Walt noses into the Lor kids’ scrapes with the local delinquents, mostly Asian or black, -- and as usual with the kind of classic revenge or town-taming thriller that Gran Torino aims for, the confrontations get tenser and more explosive. By the time of the movie’s sad furious climax (which is the only moment here I‘d question), Walt has faced a last battle and director-star Eastwood has notched another late-career revisionist triumph in his six-shooter canon.

It’s easy to look at Gran Torino -- which comes from a salty, likable screenplay by Nick Schenck, apparently written, according to Richard Corliss, without Clint in mind -- and dig out all the Dirty Harry connections, ending with kudos to Eastwood for reversing them -- which is, in a way, what I’ve been sort of doing so far in this review so far. But, despite the obvious mellowing and self-criticism, I’ve always thought Dirty harry and the Dollars Trilogy weren’t as far from Unforgiven and the other late Eastwoods as some of us like to think. Harry wasn’t really a racist and the Man may not have had a Name, but he had a code.

Gran Torino, seems in some ways a bid to re-establish Clint the star after that four year hiatus, and I think it will. The movie, Eastwood‘s second directorial effort this year, is less well-written than Changeling was and less surprising or original as a story. But, with Eastwood calling the shots, it’s another fine piece of moviemaking: lean and tough and laid out with an almost merciless clarity. It’s also more of a comedy than he’s done in a while. All in the Family and Archie Bunker parallels have been popping up in the reviews as often as Dirty Harry allusions, and the mostly amateur Hmong cast -- as well as old pros like John Carroll Lynch as Walt’s equally foul-mouthed barber buddy -- give good understated natural performances too. Especially Her.

One irony of Eastwood’s later flexography -- the movies he‘s been making since Bird, and especially the ones he made starting with Unforgiven, is that his whole major career strategy was based on star power, on using his box-office clout to carve out his directorial career. With Unforgiven (even a little earlier with Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man and White Hunter, Black Heart, he began undercutting that star power, playing against his carefully crafted macho image. Them, of course, after “Baby,” Eastwood for a while abandoned his screen image entirely and concentrated instead on directing -- and though he’s gotten awful damned good at it, and has been able to choose projects he couldn’t have taken on as a star actor, I like seeing him on screen again. I don’t think this should be a valedictory. I hope he doesn’t rule out working for other directors. I even hope he makes another Western.

The special kick of watching big, long-lived movie stars in a show is that we‘re seeing people we feel we know, with whom we share a history, albeit an imaginary one. That’s part of what makes Gran Torino such an enjoyable experience. It’s not the best or deepest thing he’s done recently. But Walt is his man, Gran Torino is his vehicle and he knows how to drive them home.

By the way, here’s the Western Eastwooid could still do, maybe even that he should do. An adaptation of Dorothy Johnson’s story Lost Sister. It’s a masterpiece waiting to happen, and it could even be shot partly in Monument Valley. Meanwhile, it’s nice to see that squint again.

-by Michael Wilmington

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