Gran Torino

This film depicts a Clint Eastwood vision about a man, Walter Kowalski, that only Clint Eastwood the aged actor could portray.

The work is framed by two funerals, that of his wife at the opening, his own at the close. Kowalski’s has been the straight-shooting, no-nonsense life of the soldier, factory worker, husband and farther. He dominates the moment by force of will, does not know fear and is unfazed by the ravages of old age, which are gradually consuming his tobacco-filled alcoholic body. He embodies the ramrod straightness of the dutiful, self-reliant Midwestern psyche.

Playing against this basic character description is an underside dating back to military service in Korea. Walt is haunted by the memories of take no prisoner combat; specifically, he cannot expunge or depotentiate the image of killing a terrified teenager trying desperately to surrender. Pulling the trigger at that moment, though inevitable, was a kind of act against nature; it was simply wrong in a fundamental sense that admits neither of forgetting nor of atonement.

A kind of minor league antagonist to Walt is the earnest young cleric who pursues him with the justification that Walt’s wife, in her final days, asked the priest to give him some attention, presumably in the hope that his loss would direct him back to the Church. Walt’s hostility to and contempt for this unseasoned, cliché-spouting emissary of God has every justification. The one who dons the vestments as mediator to eternal life without even a passing acquaintance with darkness on this plane is a ridiculous figure. Come the end of the story, though, Walt will need him as a witness to his confession, in the service of completion, not the seeking of forgiveness.

In the changing Michigan neighborhood, Walt’s house has become surrounded by those of Hmong immigrants, a group that had been friendly to the American side during the Viet Nam War. Full of racial prejudice, he resents the impingement these people represent. At the core of the story is the relationship that develops between him and the teenage Asian boy Thao next door, who had been given as an initiatory task by the neighborhood thugs—his cousins—the job of stealing Walt’s vintage Gran Torino.

From their view of indebtedness, this family owes Walt doubly: for the disgrace of the boy’s intended theft and for the rescue of his older sister from a black street gang. As the boy becomes his protégé and as Sue will not let Walt’s gruff exterior impinge on her perception of his loneliness, a new familial configuration emerges.

Thao has three lessons to learn from Walt. The first is that for a man to make his place in the world he has to know how to sell his labor and develop his skills. Second, as imaged by Walt’s tool-rich workshop, he has to learn to discriminate the right tool for a particular challenge. Third, in the transition from boy to man, he must develop the patience to pick his battles, to choose those that inescapably belong to him, and to think through in each case what winning or losing would look like.

Opening the door to Thao’s entry into the work world and outfitting him with what he needs to have a proper toolbox come relatively easily; they pass via instruction. By contrast, the ability to stand back, weigh one’s options, and pick the right moment to act can only be taught by example.

Because of the urgency of a dying man’s desire (Walt has learned that he is terminally ill) to get this message across, the film in its later segments touches an unanticipated, yet thoroughly integrated, level of depth.

As a bridge to the conclusion, Walt seeks out the priest for confession. In doing so, his aim is not the absolution which confession promises but the being witnessed in an act of self-disclosure that defines who he is to himself. His confession has three parts; two are personal, while one is generational. Once at a party he kissed another woman in a room adjacent to where his wife was, an unforgivable gesture sullying an otherwise pure love. On a separate occasion, he made $900.00 in a transaction without ever reporting it as income on his taxes, which to him means nothing less than the rupture of the social contract between the individual and the government. Also, he knows by observing the men his two sons became that his unapproachable male ego left them profoundly deficient as adults. Though he was merely being the kind of man his world venerated, that excuse does not satisfy him.

He knows that his is not the path of passive dying from ravaging disease. Only by choosing the form and circumstances of his own death can he offer a final mentoring to Thao, his spiritual heir, and, of course, the heir to the Gran Torino. He must confront the gang that was on the brink of swallowing up the young man and that brutally raped his sister, Sue, in an assertion of territoriality and authority. Having undergone the transformation mediated throughout his life by the memory of Korea, Walt sees that he must offer himself as undefended soldier, surrendering in a public forum to the power of being witnessed.

To achieve that, Walt takes himself unarmed into the territory of the Asian thugs, cigarette in hand, lighter in pocket. Reaching in his ultimate gesture for that light, Walt is riddled by the gang’s bullets. As defenseless as the youth who had tried to surrender to him all those decades earlier, he is anointed with the aura of willing sacrifice.

The fearful neighbors have witnessed the slaughter as the gang reached beyond the limits of its power; its members will face long prison terms for murder. Tao has been given the exact gift he needs as the prelude to riding off in his new vehicle. As a man who has never strayed from the ethic of accountability, Walt is able to communicate that the choices made at each life moment are serious, lasting, and either right or wrong. His is the voice of a now vanished time in which what a man was to himself trumped what he could get away with in the world. Tao will have to drive on his own road, but without losing the gift of how to process experience.