..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Gran Torino
Directed by Clint Eastwood

Holy Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award! Gran Torino is a dark comedy, an engaged anecdote about class and race, a stripped-down example of palooka art, and Clint Eastwood, at 78, has made a modest, yet almost radical entertainment. It's a gleeful astonishment.

Eastwood's always been a simple shooter, letting cameras roll on rehearsals and calling it a keeper. The results can be striking orstrange, as in the work of another veteran filmmaker, Woody Allen. Sometimes the effect of working quickly is a movie with graceful notes like Vicky Christina Barcelona, and sometimes it's hollow bunkum like Cassandra's Dream. And even in a well-regarded movie like Match Point, performances seem otherworldly strange, especially in how the actors seem almost never to engage with each other. A fascinating effect, but an intentional one? I'd like to think of Eastwood as one of the most conscious of filmmakers, even if he's known for picking up a script and shooting as-is.

In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retiree from Detroit's factories, a veteran of the Korean War, now a widower. A large American flag graces the front of the house. He's a shambling embodiment of "politically incorrect." From Eastwood's first scowl and squint of eagle eye standing at the front of a church before his wife's casket, in which he audibly grrrowls like a cartoon back-alley cur, I was giddy as a girl child. Well, whatever… as Walt tends to say.

A widower who doesn't like his children, Walt's cast aside. They're inattentive, grasping drips. He doesn’t care for his wife's religion. He's a 78-year-old man in a no-longer Polish neighborhood with ghosts and with new faces, largely Hmong. Still, he has moments of autumnal rest: on his porch, popping a PBR, admiring the Gran Torino in the drive at sunset, murmuring to his faithful, elderly golden dog, "Ainnnt-she-sweet." Full stop.

Lives collide after teenage neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) is pressured by a gang to steal Walt's treasure. But an unlikely savior lives within. Eastwood adopts a growl for Walt that's not quite a Christian Bale maw of cracked glass, but to actually hear "What th' hell is this? Get. Off. My. Lawnnnn" from behind his bolt-action weapon. "I useta stack fucks like you five-feet-high in Korea and use ya for sandbags" is the coldest racially insensitive line I've heard from an older actor since Rip Torn turned to a female, Asian-American executive an episode of The Larry Sanders Show and inquired, "Didn't I kill you in Korea?" Eastwood's after more than the gag: not a half-an-hour in, the unvarnished man is revealed. Flawed. Casually racist. Unregenerate. Dirty Archie (Bunker). Who will he be ninety minutes from now? "Get off my lawn." (He's got the verbals about "dagos" and Jews, too.) "Hard-nosed Polack sonofabitch," his barber (John Carroll Lynch in a nice turn) happily calls after him. "See you in three weeks, prick." "Not if I see you first, dipshit."

Pared-down images abound. For instance, when Walt enters the garage where his car's threatened, rifle on his shoulder, Eastwood places the camera behind himself, the cowl of the overhead light dancing above his head and shivering a fall of decades of dust on his hair and shoulders. Simple. Epic. Dust to dust and all that.

What's on show is an old man's art. Old. Man. Clipped, stripped, frontal, not in the least sclerotic. Call it impatient precision. And there is tenderness, a streak of kindliness in his performance as a bigot who warms to humanity, like an American Vittorio De Sica film. (Critic David Ehrenstein is reminded of Umberto D.)

It's an "if-you-have-but-eyes-to-see" kind of movie: if you sense the genuine, glorious strengths of Gran Torino, you can appreciate its idiosyncratic carborundum grace. If not, you'll be asking your date, "And WTF was that ending?"

What does it mean to be an old man, alone, with a gun? Or several? The decline of masculinity? Masculinity in crisis? The slow dying of the light? Gran Torino? Well, whatever… It's a beaut.

- Ray Pride

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