Gran Torino

This was not a good movie though you wouldn't know it by the laughter of the audience in the theater where I went to see it. They laughed at the racial epithets; they laughed at other foul language. They cheered Eastwood for singlehandedly taking on neighborhood bullies. The movie was unbelievable at best, offensive or racist at worst, racist not because Eastwood's character suffered this problem but because his behavior went largely unchallenged. Sure, he needed and received a few moral lessons from two Asian (Hmong) teens whom he later decides to protect, and the neighborhood gang members don't like him, but for some reason--even though they are eventually well-armed--allow him to remain alive long enough to confess his sins and fulfill his purposes. Certainly, viewers could not have missed the fact that Walt dies prostrate, his arms and legs outstretched as if on the cross. What has he sacrificed? His life for the American dream?The viewer is supposed to believe that this unlikely hero, unlikely because he is so full of hate, has by movie's end, grown over the course of a few weeks. His sins are not, we are led to admit, that great. (The parish priest responds, "Is that all?" after Walt's confession.) What harm is there in casting a few aspersions from time to time, or in the case of Eastwood's character, a machine-gun firing of them. Midway through the movie, one begins to think that racial slurs have become terms of endearment, which leaves the viewer decided I think that anyone who would be offended by the use of them is just being overly sensitive. This in fact will be one of the lessons the main character has to teach, that the mouths of hard-working, honest white men may not always be nice, but derisiveness is just an innocent part of working class culture. Anyone who wants to become a part of that culture had better embrace its rugged, i.e. manly, character.Suddenly, this representative white man likes the good minorities; he goes from cursing (and pulling his rifle on) anyone who steps on his perfectly-maintained lawn and outright rejecting tokens of appreciation given by his neighbors, to having barbeques in his backyard and partying with teens in the basement of his neighbor's dilapidated home. At one point, one of the teens asks him why he is there, to which he answers he is a friend of the pubescent Asian boy. Upstairs, the Hmong women dote on him; he has become a near savior to whom they give their own offerings. They feed him Hmong cuisine; he fixes up their house because somehow he is the only person on the block who has any standard of cleanliness. He is also the only person on the block who is not full of fear and who has any notion of how to protect himself. The Hmong men are entirely emasculated. Though there are several men who we see in Walt's neighbor's home, it is only he--with some help from his Italian barber and a white construction foreman--who knows how to teach young Tao to be a man.Also troubling is that this urban flick showed so little of the city that was its setting. We have a few scenes where Eastwood is driving up or down Charlevoix Street, whose emptiness may be somewhat realistic given what has happened to Detroit and its suburb Highland Park. But I know this particular city, and the absence of other people on the streets, lots of other people, made it feel just like a movie and like the streets had actually been cleared for Eastwood to make the film. I cannot imagine clearing the streets of New York or Chicago in this way, not to protect the actors and actresses from the real urban savages but to create a sense of an abandoned city. How could you depict city life in Chicago without people on the streets, walking, catching the El, etc? In short, the Highland Park that we see in this movie is far, far, far from the real thing especially in summer! I'm not sure that anyone would have known that the movie took place in Highland Park had we not seen the city's name on the side of a police car at the end of the movie, and we also would not have known the setting was Michigan had we not seen one license plate bearing the state's name. The erasure of the real fabric of this city, or at least little attempt to depict it makes one wonder the relationship between this choice made by the movie's director and the message of this movie. One could argue that a clean slate on which some message could be written was required, or one could argue even more controversially that the real meaning and significance of racism has been wiped clean. With this movie, which alas is just entertainment, one is distracted from seeing the real, deep, costs of racism. It is the lack of depth which allows the racial epithets to seem humorous.But what was the movie's message if there in fact was one? (A) That old white men who are tough enough to remain in a city neighborhood where they are in the racial minority can take down the bad guys all by themselves, (B) That the generations who moved to the suburbs don't care anything about the parents they may have left behind, (C) That there are still real men in America, (D) Death of the American dream, (E) Creation of a new frontier in the old city, or (F) the wildness and/or irrationality of the urban? Perhaps the message was none of these; perhaps it was all of these. Perhaps Gran Torino, which had little to do with that actual model or with Ford Motor Company in the '70s when the car was built, is simply a Postmodern mishmash (pastiche) though I suppose one could argue that the Torino stands for the height of American muscle. Then, this would be a movie about American loss, human loss, and whether rebirth is possible. Still, this message is not clear, and in the movie's lack of coherence it is not the first movie to create this new genre.In short, I think this movie was an attempt to provide new purpose and new inspiration for a particular demographic not sure of anything anymore, a population that desperately wants and needs a character who transcends fear of the urban. Why not Eastwood? Of course Eastwood. In Gran Torino, he delights his audience. After so many decades of oversensitivity, of tense racial politics, we are all kids again; our faith and innocence are restored. What's more, we may be able to go home again, to return to the cities stolen from our fathers, a crime of which Detroit is most symbolic. Eastwood's character both tames the wild (cleans up the neighborhood literally and figuratively) and tutors a noble savage on the American work ethic. With the bad guys locked up (post-industrial prison complex), whites who want to return to the city from meaningless suburban lives can do so.Finally, the difficulty of fitting this movie nicely into a genre is one of the things that makes it postmodern. And when there is no clear message in today's art, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate or criticize it. Anyone who claims that this movie is racist will simply be told to get some balls!