MALLINation

Eastwood in Gran Torino

Gran Torino is Clint Eastwood’s go at what Nobody’s Fool was for Paul Newman, or True Grit was for John Wayne – a grand autumnal career sum-up. Unfortunately Clint the director surrounds Clint the actor with a cast that needed more work than he’s used to providing, and Clint the actor has saddled himself with a wisp of a screenplay that relies on cliche when a touch of subtlety would have sufficed.

Eastwood is still a pleasure to watch – he warns the guests at the funeral reception for his wife that there will be lots of ham and it’s a nod and a wink to a performance that features the most expressive growling since Sgt. Belker on TV’s Hill Street Blues. He rasps around like he’s auditioning for the next Batman film, his face bonier but still squintily commanding.

When neighborhood thugs attempt to backtalk him, you can sense the actors being intimidated by Squintwood stare.

The ham is welcome in contrast to the flat under-rehearsed line readings from almost every other actor in the film. Only seasoned character actor John Carroll Lynch is able to rise above the tide, leaving promising newcomers Bee Vang and Ahney Her as Eastwood’s Hmong brother and sister next door neighbors adrift.

Eastwood is known as a one-take director, which can lead to variable performances from the best of veteran actors – check out Tim Robbins layered intensity in Mystic River compared to Sean Penn’s slightly over-the-top turn in the same film.

Back to Gran Torino, there are some promising ideas in Nick Shenk’s  uncooked screenplay – setting the drama in Detroit for instance which sets the generational and ethnic differences in even sharper relief.

Too often though we are told things rather than shown them – Eastwood mutters a Popeye-like monologue of his thoughts that seems like a bit of a cheat. Eastwood glares at his son’s Toyota and mutters something about buying American and then we see the son in the car lamenting dad’s constant buy American griping. Yes, we get it.

The kids and grand kids are the worst characters in the film, barely one dimensional caricatures of youngsters for the old codger to shake his fist at. It sucks the power out of the few genuinely insightful scenes, such as when Clint calls his son and the family all attempts to duck the call.

In the end, Gran Torino asks for an emotional payoff that it never quite earns. Too often it feels like the kind of film the in the early 80s would have been a TV movie starring Gedde Watanabe and Jack Palance.

That is, except for the actual ending, a mess of loose ends tied up in an unbelievable and thuddingly symbolic way. Eastwood has always been interested in themes of sacrifice and redemption but it takes more than having a character die with their arms spread out like a cross to make those feel earned.