Review of Gran Torino

First of all, let me say that Clint Eastwood new film, "Gran Torino," is Oscar bait. It won't win an Oscar this year because it wasn't released in time to qualify, but wait till next year. All the elements are there: a plot, a cast, and a director that has been there before, many times.

Though the central character, Walt Kowalksi, has a name, you probably won't remember it very long after you have seen this film, because Walt is really a cinematic reincarnation of The Man With No Name, the central of character of Sergio Leone's genre-defining "spaghetti westerns" that launched Eastwood's film career in the 1960s.

The plot: a retired Polish-American assembly line worker in Highland Park, Michigan, who defines himself as a "Polack," finds himself in the middle of a turf war between Hmong and Hispanic street gangs. He's the last "Polack" on the block, and he just wants to be left alone, but he only gets more and more involved until the whole thing explodes with deadly violence at the climax as he confronts a Hmong gang trying to force a recalcitrant Hmong youth, Thao (played by Bee Vang), to join their fight against the Hispanics. Then Thao's sister, Sue Vang Lor (Ahney Her) is beaten and raped.

The cast: the last white man on the block and the Hmong neighbours that surround him. Though Highland Park is besieged by Detroit, Walt is a senior citizen who refused to join the white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. With the funeral of his wife after the opening credits, there's only him, his house, and his Gran Torino from the 1970s. Walt is a relic, like his car, while his neighbours are the wave of the future: non-white.

Among the Hmong, Thao, you could say, is "Old Country," shy and timid, seemingly afraid of his old shadow. As for Sue, well, she is sure to become a feminist once she goes to university in the States, because she's a feisty one, ready to confront the gang members while Thao is not. Sue is as American as Gloria Steinem.

The director, of course, is Eastwood himself. As director, he puts to use what he learned from three films with Leone ("The Man With No Name" trilogy) and ten films with Don Siegal (the Dirty Harry films), among others.

Not that he's a neophyte as a director: he directed himself in "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Unforgiven," as well as the biography of jazz great Charlie Parker in "Bird." And Eastwood is certainly no neophyte as an actor, going back more than fifty years, first gaining renown as Rowdy Yates in the western television series, "Rawhide."

If Eastwood's fans were the types to find many layers of ambiguity in films, they might look at "Gran Torino" at many levels. Yes, Walt Kowalski is a reprise of Dirty Harry, Eastwood's urban anti-hero, and The Man With No Name, his western anti-hero. But Walt is also the old cowboy in "Unforgiven," who only wants a little peace before he dies.

Somehow, I think that, over time, Eastwood has come to realize that, if you live by the six-shooter, you die by it. That look of haunted menace that he perfected in Leone's films, he got from Korean War veterans. I know, because my father had the same look. My father was decorated for valour, and he never told anybody why. While Eastwood never made it to the front, he undoubtedly had seen the men who came back from "The Forgotten War" forever changed. Eastwood is probably haunted by that war, because he would have been there, but he had to testify in a hearing about a helicopter crash. Maybe he thinks he should have been there.

When the hero is an anti-hero, it's because he is confronted with a situation in which he must bend or break the rules of the society that he was raised in. The western hero is almost always an anti-hero, even Gary Cooper in "High Noon." Whether you're the outlaw or the sheriff, you break the rules of society when you have a "draw" in the middle of Main Street on a Sunday afternoon. Civilized people just don't do it.

Eastwood probably understands that there's the element of the absurd in westerns: all you want to do is get out of Dodge, but some badman is holding captive the woman that you knew in a biblical sense the night before. It sounds absurd, but what do you do? Heroes in western movies are faced with these kinds of situations all the time.

I think Albert Camus, the French Nobel laureate, would have appreciated Eastwood's films, because "Gran Torino" plays out like a movie from the Theatre of the Absurd. Kowalksi survives Chinese Red Army and North Koreans trying to kill him, only to get killed when he reaches for his Zippy Lippo lighter, as if he wants one last cigarette before his execution.

Talk about dying for a cigarette! But, hey, the killer thought he was reaching for a gun. Self-defence, right? Not in a court of law.

If you're willing to look, you can find all kinds of nuances in a Clint Eastwood film, because the good, the bad, and the ugly are all the same, yet different from each other. You probably won't find any memorable lines in "Gran Torino," like "Make my day," but the good cinematographer knows that it's what the movie goer sees on the screen that beguiles, not the dialogue. People don't watch films in Braille.

I can't wait to see Eastwood's upcoming biopic of Nelson Mandela, "The Human Factor." Which Nelson Mandela are we going to see: the terrorist, or the martyr for human rights who wasted twenty-seven years of his life in prison isolation? Will Eastwood's Nelson Mandela be the Walt Kowalksi at the end of the bullet, or the Hmong gang member at the beginning of it?

If Eastwood is true to form, his Mandela will be some combination of both. You will see in Mandela the good, the bad, and the ugly, like you see in Walt Kowalksi, and all of Eastwood's heroes.