Gran Torino
It's easy (and somewhat true) to apply clichéd pitch meeting mash-ups like “Archie Bunker meets Dirty Harry” to Gran Torino, but that just doesn't do justice to this fantastic swan song for Clint Eastwood's career—in front of the camera, anyway.
Actually, Gran Torino can best be compared to John Wayne's final film, The Shootist. If you're not familiar with it, rent it today. In the film, Wayne plays an aging gunslinger in the quickly modernizing American West of the early 1900s. He's also dying of cancer, as was Wayne himself at the time, and determined to go down in a blaze of glory rather than waste away in a bed somewhere. The parallels between life and art are severe, and The Shootist is one of Wayne's finest performances.
Gran Torino is far less fatalistic than The Shootist, but the theme of career encapsulation is very similar. Starting with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 as The Man with No Name, Eastwood staked his claim to the film noir anti-hero-turned-western gunfighter, a man drifting through a landscape of scalawags, bushwhackers, thieves and murderers, surviving by his own internally developed moral code rather than society's inapplicable dictum of right and wrong.
It's a character he would come back to again and again in one form or another, from Harry Callahan to Josey Wales to William Munny, and it came to define his acting career. Only late in his career has he broken from that mold, and since Eastwood has strongly hinted that Gran Torino is probably his last role on screen, it only makes sense that he would circle back to the archetype that made him famous and expose the bruised hero underneath that leathery facade.
In his stereotypical plainness, Walt Kowalski is a unique version of that man, a new widower residing in a crumbling Detroit neighborhood overrun by Hmong immigrants he bunches together with the Koreans and Chinese he fought in the Korean War. He drops racial epithets like prepositions in casual conversation and has little but contempt for the changing world around him—some of it justified. The only thing left that gives him pride is his vintage 1972 Gran Torino, which he helped build during a long career on the Ford assembly line.
Walt also carries a dark secret that has haunted him for more than 50 years, something so painful that his late wife insisted their young parish priest badger him into going to confession. Walt wants no such thing, insisting on living with the guilt of whatever it was that has hardened his heart over so many years. Then an unexpected opportunity at redemption breaks into his garage and tries to steal his prized possession.
Thao, the Hmong teenager next door, is actually a good kid browbeaten into stealing the car as an initiation ritual for a gang he wants no part of. Walt stops the theft, and when the gang returns to harass Thao for his failure, he interrupts that, too. According to Hmong tradition, Thao must make amends to Walt for his shameful attempted robbery, and Walt slowly takes to the kid, whose uncomplaining acceptance of this rite of passage stands in stark contrast to his own spoiled grandchildren. When the gang won't leave Thao and his older sister, Sue, alone, escalating their attacks to a dangerous level even Walt didn't expect, his choice of how to confront the gang will have a profound impact on the rest of Thao and Sue's lives.
Walt's decision, in relation to what those other Eastwood characters would have done, is the whole point of Gran Torino really. Walt's redemption for sins past is an unmistakable meditative finale to a famed Hollywood life built on the gun play of men of amorphous morality. Eastwood's brilliant performance resonates through the halls of his storied career, summarizing and illuminating it at the same time.
Eastwood's only misstep with Gran Torino may be the inexperienced cast of Hmong actors he chose, most of whom aren't so good frankly. While it works well in the comedic sense of humanizing them against a bigoted stalwart of the 1950s, their lack of professional acting experience comes close to tripping up the most dramatic moments of the film. Eastwood the director prevents that from happening through his usual economic brand of storytelling, in which no critical detail is left out and nothing superfluous remains; but it's Eastwood the actor who drives Gran Torino off the lot and down Sunset Boulevard as the perfect retirement vehicle for a Hollywood icon.