Gran Torino is a Remarkable Movie

I rarely walk out of a movie and say "wow." However, that's exactly the reaction my wife and I had when we emerged from seeing Clint Eastwood's latest movie "Gran Torino." While the gaunt, aging Eastwood plays the same iconic loner who appeared in Spaghetti Westerns and the Dirty Harry films, his character is decidedly more complex.

In many respects, this is familiar territory. Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker, who is left alone with his bitterness after his beloved wife dies. He is angry and resentful toward everyone around him from his self-absorbed sons to the Asian immigrants taking over his neighborhood to the earnest, young Catholic priest who tries to prod him into going to confession (leading him to retort "I confess that I don't want to go to confession."). He is an unrepentent bigot who has a seemingly endless vocabulary of ethnic slurs to sling at his Hmong neighbors, who he equates with the Chinese he fought in the Korean War.

However, Kowalski's wall against the outside world starts to crack when the teenage boy next door ries to steal his prized mint 1972 Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. The failed theft leads to a confrontation between the boy and the gang. When Kowalski comes out rifle in hand and growls "Get off of my lawn" through gritted teeth and scares away the punks, he becomes a neighborhood hero. The scenes that follow are almost comic as his traditional Asian neighbors reluctantly reach out to him despite his protestations. Finally, the ice is broken when the boy's sister gets through to him with the universal language of beer.

As the plot develops, Kowalski becomes the protector and mentor of the teenage Hmong boy,taking the place of his deceased father. Kowalski teaches him everything from how to wear a tool belt to the proper way to talk to a girl. The gang resents having their initiate taken away from them and retaliates, leading to a confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The ending contains a surprise twist and redemption for the angry old man.

The movie is remarkable on many levels. To see character development in a Clint Eastwood movie is refreshing. The clash of cultures between the traditional Polish-American Kowalski and his traditional Hmong neighbors is delicately played out. The sympathetic portrayal of a naive young Catholic priest is also engaging. Without spoiling the ending too badly, there is also a sequence where Eastwood plays homage to the John Wayne role in "Rooster Cogburn." While the critics have given this a ho-hum response, it is a movie worth seeing.