It’s a story about redemption!
Filmed in the Detroit area, it was fun for me (having lived there 16 years) to see the homes and streets so typical of this workingman’s city, and a few remarks about the cold weather uttered by Walt (Eastwood) – weather that ought to keep the foreigners out.
Which brings me to the heart of the story: Walt is a retired autoworker who put the steering column into his pride and joy, a mint-condition, 1972 Gran Torino. His is the story of Detroit – the auto industry waning, the population flux overwhelming, and the world Walt knew is no more – he’s a stranger in a strange land, right in his own neighborhood.
His wife of many years died, his children don’t understand him, and he sits on his porch, guns ready, drinking gallons of beer and smoking, grumbling and mumbling to himself about the “slopes” next door and the general condition of the world he no longer understands.
The story is really very funny much of the time as the script unloads virtually ever racial and ethnic slur in the American vocabulary (with the exception of the “n” word, for which I was grateful). Walt doesn’t know how to talk about anyone different than him other than in crude ways. Even his barber who’s been cutting his hair for years is greeted with a string of ethnic epithets and curses, and gladly returned by the barber. As Eastwood delivers these lines, the audience is heartily laughing, though guardedly, I noticed.
As Eastwood grudgingly gets to know the family next door, and grumpily befriends the young man, they both go to the barber shop where Eastwood is going to school him in the fine art of man-talk. It’s comedic energy reminded me of the scene in “The Bird Cage,” when Robin Williams tries to teach Nathan Lane how to walk like a man. Enough said. It’s great and full of belly laughs.
But Eastwood is doing more than an Archie Bunker routine; Eastwood captures the alienation of an American workingman who sees his world fading away. It’s a lonely, angry, time.
The Hmong family next door and their traditions is a highlight of the film – there are other cultures and other worlds, and these days, the borders between are growing thin. What will we do?
Religion plays an interesting role here. Fr. Janovich (Cristopher Carley) is young and “just-outta-priest-school” befriended by Walt’s wife in her dying days. She made the young priest promise to get Walt to confession, and he works at it with considerable pastoral skill. Though collared and liturgically garbed some of the time, much of time the young priest is dressed casually. Does this young priest represent a new world as well?
Being a pastor myself, I’m sensitive to the stereotypes that mostly show up on the tube and the silver screen – no stereotypes here – a well-done job by the writers and Eastood.
The most striking feature of the story is the ending, and I won’t give it away, other than to say it’s a real surprise – a moment of redemption and love, and as every religion knows, redemption and love are costly! But the price is worth it!
An entertaining film with a very good story – the price of seeing this film is worth it.
2 comments:
I was going to bring this movie up the other night in your Bible study. It's a nice contrast between the violent method and the peaceful one. Did not want you accidentally giving away the ending though, so I kept it to myself...
That would have been great ... I didn't think about it ... but that's it! But, yeah, I'm sure some there would like to see it - the ending is a genuine surprise, or at least it was for me.
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