Clunker
Gran Torino (2008)
directed by Clint Eastwood
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Clint Eastwood has famously and recently bemoaned our inability, as a culture, to tolerate/stomach an innocent joke at the expense of Rabbis, Mexicans, and Polacks, and Gran Torino, it seems, is the ever over-praised director’s explication and defense of that small, silly pronouncement. Clint isn’t racist – not really – because a hard-working family of Hmong immigrants can change his mind about the direction of an economically destitute Michigan factory town. Walt treats his Hmongs like people, so if he likes to unwind with an off-color remark, then it’s cultural – a little ball-busting, like bantering with his barber – and nothing personal.
I prefer screenwriter Nick Schenk's MO: write lines that sound great when Dirty Harry speaks them. My problem with Gran Torino isn’t Clint’s grouchy conservatism – which is what it is – but two minutes at the end of the movie that show the reading of Kowalski’s will. In it, Walt leaves his prized 1972 Gran Torino to the Hmong teenager he took under his wing. Well and good, except for a caveat attached to the bequest: that the kid not dress the car up with new decals and spoilers, like immigrant kids are wont to do. Intended as one last word from Walt the honest joker – a bit of belligerence that everyone can laugh at – the will sounds oddly out of place.
The truth is, Walt the insular Korean War veteran wouldn’t be so attuned to the slang, the slurs, and the fashion statements of the current crop of Michigan street gangs. Which means, to me, that someone else’s anger at spoilers, hatchbacks, and rims can’t help but bleed onto the celluloid a little. Eastwood’s over-bearing points about violence exhausted, he can’t resist one last spittle-flecked expression of outrage at the sort of people ruining his little corner of the Pacific Coast Highway near Carmel. Pretty petty.
directed by Clint Eastwood
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Clint Eastwood has famously and recently bemoaned our inability, as a culture, to tolerate/stomach an innocent joke at the expense of Rabbis, Mexicans, and Polacks, and Gran Torino, it seems, is the ever over-praised director’s explication and defense of that small, silly pronouncement. Clint isn’t racist – not really – because a hard-working family of Hmong immigrants can change his mind about the direction of an economically destitute Michigan factory town. Walt treats his Hmongs like people, so if he likes to unwind with an off-color remark, then it’s cultural – a little ball-busting, like bantering with his barber – and nothing personal.
I prefer screenwriter Nick Schenk's MO: write lines that sound great when Dirty Harry speaks them. My problem with Gran Torino isn’t Clint’s grouchy conservatism – which is what it is – but two minutes at the end of the movie that show the reading of Kowalski’s will. In it, Walt leaves his prized 1972 Gran Torino to the Hmong teenager he took under his wing. Well and good, except for a caveat attached to the bequest: that the kid not dress the car up with new decals and spoilers, like immigrant kids are wont to do. Intended as one last word from Walt the honest joker – a bit of belligerence that everyone can laugh at – the will sounds oddly out of place.
The truth is, Walt the insular Korean War veteran wouldn’t be so attuned to the slang, the slurs, and the fashion statements of the current crop of Michigan street gangs. Which means, to me, that someone else’s anger at spoilers, hatchbacks, and rims can’t help but bleed onto the celluloid a little. Eastwood’s over-bearing points about violence exhausted, he can’t resist one last spittle-flecked expression of outrage at the sort of people ruining his little corner of the Pacific Coast Highway near Carmel. Pretty petty.
posted by NPK at 9:03 PM
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