You better get off his lawn

Gran Torino
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Clint Eastwood is both the best and worst aspect of “Gran Torino.” Eastwood the actor is really terrific here, utilizing his legendary screen persona—leathery skin, squinty eyes, intimidating stature—to create a protagonist that at first seems like a broad caricature and slowly evolves into a fascinating human character.

Eastwood the director, on the other hand, doesn’t know the meaning of the word “subtlety,” and here he has the tendency to overemphasize elements of the story that are already obvious. It’s dramatic overkill.

His approach to directing has always been a simple one, and like David Mamet, John Sayles or Mike Leigh, he is a point-and-shoot filmmaker, focusing more on performance and plotting than on wild directorial flourishes. His films are usually pretty restrained, but “Gran Torino” feels as though it was written entirely in italics, as if Eastwood didn’t trust the audience to understand the picture’s major themes.

Take, for instance, a sequence in which Eastwood, playing an old curmudgeon named Walt Kowalski, interrupts a group of black teenagers assaulting a young Asian girl. He curses at them, threatens them with a gun, throws around a few racial slurs, growlingly pontificates about how the world has gone to hell and how punks like them have caused it.

Although Eastwood is magnetic in his delivery, the scene plays out in such a didactic way that, much like in the manipulative, sermonizing, simple-minded “Crash,” it doesn’t feel as though screenwriter Nick Schenk is using this film as an outlet for real human drama: This movie is like a soapbox upon which its characters vocalize various social, racial and political issues.

Now, I don’t object to what the film is saying, but to how it is being said: “Gran Torino” sometimes feels more like a thesis than it does a movie, and although it certainly isn’t ignoble, it makes its points with all the nuance of a term paper.

But there are some wonderful scenes in the picture, and they’re so good they made me wish that Eastwood had taken the script and gone off in a completely different direction with it. The most effective parts of “Gran Torino” focus on Walt’s relationship with the neighbor kids—the smart, confident Sue (Ahney Her) and the introverted Thao (Bee Vang), both of Hmong descent.

Walt, quietly devastated by his wife’s recent death and closed off from his family, is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with their culture. But he finds them warm and inviting and is soon drawn into their world. He calls them “chinks” and “gooks” and “slant eyes,” but they become, if you can believe it, more like terms of endearment than personal insults.

Sue, who is brazen and clear-headed, first adapts to Walt’s closed-mindedness. When he warns her to stay away from his dog, she corrects him: Her people only eat cats. Later on, Walt befriends Thao, who can hardly make eye contact with anyone, and teaches him how to be confident in the presence of other people.

Those moments are a joy to watch, and Eastwood and his actors find just the right tone. But those scenes are flanked by eye-rolling melodrama involving a local gang’s attempts to compromise the innocence of Sue and Thao, and Walt saying enough is enough and taking matters into his own hands.

The middle segments of “Gran Torino” are almost at odds with the rest of the film: Imagine a thoughtful, compassionate, humble novel interrupted halfway through with a long chapter typed entirely in capital letters. It’s jarring how Eastwood approaches the dramatic material here—every Big Moment is telegraphed with overbearing music and obvious close-ups.

And Eastwood employs superficial Christ imagery at a key moment in the film, and not only has it been shoehorned into the scene for cheap dramatic effect, but it distracts us from the realism of the scene and diminishes the power of the scene.

It’s a shame that Eastwood didn’t trust “Gran Torino” to be a simple character study, or that Walt’s relationship with the kids was far more interesting than the forced melodrama of the gang warfare and the stilted monologues of moral grandstanding. This picture has interesting elements all around the fringes of its story, but it seriously sags in the middle.

Grade: B-

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Nick Schenk. Starring Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, Christopher Carley, Brian Harley and John Carroll Lynch. R; 116m.