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.
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Changeling
Using as its base the true story of a 1928 kidnapping in California, Clint Eastwood directs a complex morality tale. The film is so unconvincingly and one-dimensionally acted that it often becomes tortuous to watch. There is a rigorous mono-dimensionality to the acting that at first appears distracting, perhaps even unintentional, and then gives way to the emergence of the story on a level that is beyond "realism." By keeping representation witnin the boundary of surface, the film is freed to journey into depth that is both psychological and emotional.
A nine year old boy, Walter, is abducted during his mother’s workday (no father in the picture). Perhaps loved, he is clearly not adequately cared for. The plot is set in motion when—after a nation-wide police search—the boy has supposedly been found in the Midwest and returned home, except that he’s a very different same age child. The highly staged sentimental reunion receives wide press coverage as an instance of shining police work, a stellar triumph for an L.A. Police department known to be wildly corrupt and desperate for the slightest public relations boon. Clearly they know the boy is not her son and yet are confounded by her unwillingness to participate in the illusion.
Thus begins the mother’s quest to prove this boy is a changeling, delivered to her for an unknown reason. The maternal love she claims toward her own child now manifests as hate for this stranger; the hate, in turn, renders her an enemy to the police who—with the cooperation of the equally corrupt psychiatric establishment—have her committed to a mental hospital to silence her voice of protest.
Against this background appears the first detail calling her motives into question. All she need do is sign a statement confirming that her upset was a stress-related reaction to her anguish and she will be released from custodial detention to care for the boy. She refuses to tell this lie. What has happened is that her quest to find her biological child is trumped by the need to be truthful, not to her purpose but to literal reality. Her pseudo-heroic energy has shifted from the demand that her son be found to the defiance of authority. She has, in fact, gotten in her own way.
This moment in the film when who she is becomes suspect is the first clear signal that a parallel story is unfolding to that of a mother’s anguished search for her lost son. Will it be seen that her investment in the way she comes across is not that dissimilar to the police force’s focus on their role as public protectors?
Meanwhile, the diverse pieces related to the kidnapping begin to come clearly into view. Walter is one in a series of young boys picked up by a psychopathic, psychotic man and his terrorized young cousin. Perhaps some of the boys are sexually abused; certainly all are ultimately brutally murdered as the killer seeks momentary release from the inner voices of his own fear. The young cousin reveals what has transpired to an at first incredulous police lieutenant, substantiating his tale as he leads them to where he was forced to bury the dismembered body parts. We understand that Christina’s Walter is among the victims, learning later that his participation in a desperate escape attempt allowed another of the captive children to break free.
Fatherless Walter somehow had instinctive access to the heroic masculine, returning, after breaking free himself, to the aid of a fleeing comrade caught on a fence. In remarkable contrast to the stubborn pride of his mother, he acts fearlessly, decisively, self-sacrificially. Is the man he might have grown into someone his mother could have valued or would she have needed to devalue him as he matured?
When the moment comes for the identified and obviously guilty perpetrator of these grisly murders to come to trial (even as in an adjacent courtroom there is a disciplinary hearing about the attempted police cover-up), it is suddenly apparent that Gordon Northcott, the sadistic killer, and Christine Collins, the bereaved mother, are destined to meet and interact. Gordon, with the gram of accurate perception that often accompanies psychosis, grasps that Christine is the one person among the spectators who has experienced being cast aside, dehumanized as crazy—in her dealings with the police and her hospitalization. He intuitively grasps that the dark underbelly of daily reality always focuses on finding scapegoats so that the ordinary ‘righteous’ world can congratulate itself on the return of order.
Christine has no awareness of the piece of shared destiny Gordon describes. Two years later, on the eve of his execution, she is the one person he wants to see. But her decision to comply with the request is not in order to interact with him—to actually meet—but to get a definitive chapter-closing answer about her son’s death. As she fails to be present in good faith, he turns away and will give her nothing.
One is pulled back to the day of the kidnapping, when mother had promised her son a trip to the movies, only to go to work instead and schedule the outing for the next day. Had she looked in her son’s eyes, seen his disappointment and his dawning recognition that she would never perceive his hunger in the moment, the tragic sequence need not have occurred. Clint Eastwood, we marvel, has ever so subtly planted the seed of her inability to see the other, foreshadowing the film’s thrust.
Three years after Gordon is hanged, there is a coda. The boy who escaped that night with Walter’s help surfaces to complete the tale; he wants to be able to return to his mother. A final opportunity presents itself for Christine to see that in the life of this boy the survival of her son continues. Yet, as with the changeling child seven years before, she cannot transcend the limitations about what is or is not hers. A sad truth concerns her inability to love; at the end she is reduced to a false and unfeeling sense of hope, unable to stay with the present emotion.
In the film’s final shot, she crosses a heavily-trafficked street, oblivious to what is around her and to her own danger. Hers is a version of the plugged-in contemporary psyche, hearing only the music it has chosen and shutting out the outside. Eastwood has found a vehicle for displaying the contemporary psyche closed in on itself. By contrast to Kowalski in Eastwood’s Gran Torino who is transformed by experience, Christine is impenetrable to experience, as un-alive as the scorchingly 2-dimensional depiction Angelina Jolie embodies.
Moving from hopelessness to hope, she manages to convey that there is no difference between them. Both are mere fantasy substitutes for her unlived life.
A nine year old boy, Walter, is abducted during his mother’s workday (no father in the picture). Perhaps loved, he is clearly not adequately cared for. The plot is set in motion when—after a nation-wide police search—the boy has supposedly been found in the Midwest and returned home, except that he’s a very different same age child. The highly staged sentimental reunion receives wide press coverage as an instance of shining police work, a stellar triumph for an L.A. Police department known to be wildly corrupt and desperate for the slightest public relations boon. Clearly they know the boy is not her son and yet are confounded by her unwillingness to participate in the illusion.
Thus begins the mother’s quest to prove this boy is a changeling, delivered to her for an unknown reason. The maternal love she claims toward her own child now manifests as hate for this stranger; the hate, in turn, renders her an enemy to the police who—with the cooperation of the equally corrupt psychiatric establishment—have her committed to a mental hospital to silence her voice of protest.
Against this background appears the first detail calling her motives into question. All she need do is sign a statement confirming that her upset was a stress-related reaction to her anguish and she will be released from custodial detention to care for the boy. She refuses to tell this lie. What has happened is that her quest to find her biological child is trumped by the need to be truthful, not to her purpose but to literal reality. Her pseudo-heroic energy has shifted from the demand that her son be found to the defiance of authority. She has, in fact, gotten in her own way.
This moment in the film when who she is becomes suspect is the first clear signal that a parallel story is unfolding to that of a mother’s anguished search for her lost son. Will it be seen that her investment in the way she comes across is not that dissimilar to the police force’s focus on their role as public protectors?
Meanwhile, the diverse pieces related to the kidnapping begin to come clearly into view. Walter is one in a series of young boys picked up by a psychopathic, psychotic man and his terrorized young cousin. Perhaps some of the boys are sexually abused; certainly all are ultimately brutally murdered as the killer seeks momentary release from the inner voices of his own fear. The young cousin reveals what has transpired to an at first incredulous police lieutenant, substantiating his tale as he leads them to where he was forced to bury the dismembered body parts. We understand that Christina’s Walter is among the victims, learning later that his participation in a desperate escape attempt allowed another of the captive children to break free.
Fatherless Walter somehow had instinctive access to the heroic masculine, returning, after breaking free himself, to the aid of a fleeing comrade caught on a fence. In remarkable contrast to the stubborn pride of his mother, he acts fearlessly, decisively, self-sacrificially. Is the man he might have grown into someone his mother could have valued or would she have needed to devalue him as he matured?
When the moment comes for the identified and obviously guilty perpetrator of these grisly murders to come to trial (even as in an adjacent courtroom there is a disciplinary hearing about the attempted police cover-up), it is suddenly apparent that Gordon Northcott, the sadistic killer, and Christine Collins, the bereaved mother, are destined to meet and interact. Gordon, with the gram of accurate perception that often accompanies psychosis, grasps that Christine is the one person among the spectators who has experienced being cast aside, dehumanized as crazy—in her dealings with the police and her hospitalization. He intuitively grasps that the dark underbelly of daily reality always focuses on finding scapegoats so that the ordinary ‘righteous’ world can congratulate itself on the return of order.
Christine has no awareness of the piece of shared destiny Gordon describes. Two years later, on the eve of his execution, she is the one person he wants to see. But her decision to comply with the request is not in order to interact with him—to actually meet—but to get a definitive chapter-closing answer about her son’s death. As she fails to be present in good faith, he turns away and will give her nothing.
One is pulled back to the day of the kidnapping, when mother had promised her son a trip to the movies, only to go to work instead and schedule the outing for the next day. Had she looked in her son’s eyes, seen his disappointment and his dawning recognition that she would never perceive his hunger in the moment, the tragic sequence need not have occurred. Clint Eastwood, we marvel, has ever so subtly planted the seed of her inability to see the other, foreshadowing the film’s thrust.
Three years after Gordon is hanged, there is a coda. The boy who escaped that night with Walter’s help surfaces to complete the tale; he wants to be able to return to his mother. A final opportunity presents itself for Christine to see that in the life of this boy the survival of her son continues. Yet, as with the changeling child seven years before, she cannot transcend the limitations about what is or is not hers. A sad truth concerns her inability to love; at the end she is reduced to a false and unfeeling sense of hope, unable to stay with the present emotion.
In the film’s final shot, she crosses a heavily-trafficked street, oblivious to what is around her and to her own danger. Hers is a version of the plugged-in contemporary psyche, hearing only the music it has chosen and shutting out the outside. Eastwood has found a vehicle for displaying the contemporary psyche closed in on itself. By contrast to Kowalski in Eastwood’s Gran Torino who is transformed by experience, Christine is impenetrable to experience, as un-alive as the scorchingly 2-dimensional depiction Angelina Jolie embodies.
Moving from hopelessness to hope, she manages to convey that there is no difference between them. Both are mere fantasy substitutes for her unlived life.
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