CinePhillyist Reviews... Gran Torino

This movie is going to be up for a lot of awards, and rightfully so. It was wonderfully written (aside from the goofily absurd amount of racial slurs—more on that in a moment), brilliantly directed, and excellently acted. Except for one minor problem. Clint should hang up his acting hat and stick to directing. You gotta love the man playing a bad ass character at his age. And it actually worked, his age wasn't a problem. It's just that he's been doing "Clint" for so long that his acting comes out as over-baked. When he's growling his lines it's hard not to laugh when a laugh isn't intended because he's more like a cartoon character bully than an actual racist Michigan retiree.

And about that racism: okay we get it. The dude's a raging racist. But there was no need to be so blatantly heavy on the contrived racial slurs that peppered the entire movie. It's always better to show rather than tell in film (and in life, for that matter). But here, they may as well have been beating you over the head to tell you that the main character was frustrated that his neighborhood had gone to hell. It was amateurish, and I expected more of the film.

Other than those flaws, the movie is a crushing look at a man who has just lost his wife and is realizing that his world is no longer what he expects it to be. His sons and their families despise him; his neighborhood is populated with immigrants; he is ignoring his dead wife's wish for him to go to confession. He spends his days sitting on his porch, drinking can after can of beer out of a cooler. The man doesn't have much in his life, and doesn't seem to care. Until his life becomes intertwined with the lives of his next-door neighbors and is changed in ways he would never have expected.

As always, Eastwood's direction is near flawless and he has created another masterful film with Gran Torino. Aside from his crusty portrayal of the lead character, the rest of the cast does their job beautifully, particularly the two actors who play the teenage Hmong neighbors. They played the parts so well that they seemed as if they were just regular people plucked off the street and asked to read some lines. Their acting was practically not believable, in that they seemed so much like real people that they almost didn't belong in an Eastwood film, especially one where he's going overboard on his own lines. They played their parts almost too soft, too much like regular people. But I mean that as a compliment, truly. They seemed like they could have been anyone's neighbors, not Hollywood actors filling a role. And in that way, they gave the movie the heart and soul that it may have been otherwise lacking.

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