Review Movies: Grand Torino | Clint Eastwood | Polish-American | Walt Kowalski | Korea | settle | immigrants | Asian

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 19 February 2009

Clint Eastwood makes an impressive return to acting in Gran Torino

Gran dad Clint back on screen

GRAN TORINO
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Certificate 15

CLINT Eastwood decided five years ago he was not going to star in films any more and instead would concentrate on directing.
He has made a fair fist of it. But when you see him return to being in front of the camera to take on the role of an ageing Polish-American car worker, you can only be grateful he didn’t take an unbreakable vow against acting.
In this thoughtful story, the problems facing different generations of immigrants as they seek to settle and carve a haven out of a cynical and unfriendly world come to the fore.
Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a proud ex-serviceman who fought in Korea. He has watched slowly as his neighbourhood has become a South-east Asian community, and it forces him to confront his prejudices.
His pride and joy is a Ford Gran Torino. A car worker, he installed the steering rack into the vehicles that lies beneath the tarpaulin in his garage, and worked when America autos were coveted.
Yet the world has changed and left him behind. His old neighbours have all died or moved, to be replaced by new faces from other parts of the globe. As Ford has been usurped by Asian car manufacturers, he believes his area has also been consumed, and he does not like it.
He believes his neighbourhood has gone down hill – no one is house proud, his own home sticking out for its neatly painted fence and pristine lawn. And he is a blue collar racist, with the new immigrants, in much the same situation his own family would have had to face in the previous century, are the target of his ire.
But all this changes when Thao, the teenage son of a neighbour from Vietnam, is unwittingly dragged into a local gang and is bullied into trying to steal the Gran Torino.
Caught by Walt, what emerges is a friendship between the pair – and a new understanding of how personal relationships forge public behaviour.
The relationship between the two is believable. The let’s-all-rub-along-together line may mean there is little dramatic tension when Walt and Thao realise neither are monsters, but this minor gripe does not take away from an all round well-polished film.

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