By James Bowman on 1.30.09 @ 6:02AM
Clint Eastwood was more attractive when he was Dirty Harry and
not Clean Walt.
What are we to make of a movie that is named after a car? If it's
The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), The Yellow
Rolls-Royce (1964), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or
The Love Bug (both of 1968), Cadillac Man
(1990) or, simply Cars (2006), we can expect comedy or
romance or kiddie fantasy but nothing of serious purport. Back in
1989 Clint Eastwood starred in Pink Cadillac, supposedly
a screwball comedy though I wouldn't know. Like an overwhelming
majority of movie-goers, I didn't see it. Now Mr. Eastwood is
back, this time as director as well as star, and he's got a much
bigger success with Gran Torino. But even though there
are lots of jokes in it -- most of them racial slurs transformed
into comedy by passing through the gums of the lovable but now
very old Clint Eastwood -- it's not supposed to be a funny movie.
If only it were! Instead, like most of the later Eastwood --
since, say, Pink Cadillac -- it sinks under the weight
of its own moral portentousness.
Perhaps the centrality of the car has something to do with the
animistic religion practiced by the Hmong neighbors of Clint's
character, a curmudgeonly widower and retired Ford worker named
Walt Kowalski, in his run-down neighborhood of Detroit. As in
Million Dollar Baby there is a Roman Catholic priest
(Christopher Carley) meant to serve as Mr. Eastwood's foil who,
though the latter describes him as an "overeducated 27-year-old
virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies
and promise them everlasting life," gets off a lot easier than
the priest in the earlier movie. Like him, however, he stands for
the director's disgust with conventional Western religion. By
contrast, a Laotian shaman who tells his fortune is treated with
respect, as are the strange religious customs of the Hmong.
It's fitting, then, that the car is a kind of religion to Walt:
not only his prized possession but a symbol (as he sees it) of
the great days of the American auto industry -- now, like his own
great days, long past. This totemic quality, this aura of magic,
also extends to the rifle he uses to frighten the life out of the
Hmong teenager from next door, whom he calls Toad (Bee Vang),
when the latter is forced by his cousin to break into Walt's
garage as part of a gang initiation. Walt also has a large
handgun that he uses to similar effect on some members of another
gang who are harassing Toad's sister, Sue (Ahney Her), a feisty
gal to whom Walt has taken a shine in spite of himself and his
multifarious racial prejudices.
The guns are associated with his long-ago service in the Korean
War, which in turn is associated with some unnamed atrocity, his
own involvement in which he hints at to the priest -- even though
he doesn't think it worth confessing along with the stolen kiss
from Betty Jobinski at a Christmas party in 1968. This, together
with the other horrors, also hinted at, that he saw in Korea, has
produced a set of psychic wounds that he continues jealously to
guard as tokens of his moral authority. "What was it like to kill
someone?" Toad asks him, after he has been taken under the wing
of the older man.
"You don't want to know," says Walt, darkly.
The Unforgiven motif as well as the suggestion of
post-traumatic stress disorder will be familiar to students of
the late Eastwood who, most recently in Flags of Our
Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, keeps coming
back to the subject of the psychic costs of violence with little
or no consideration given to the reasons for it. In Gran
Torino as elsewhere, this produces a strange, other-worldly
quality to the moral dramas he would present us with. Why are
these people hurting themselves and others? Why would we not want
to know that? But if the movies know, like Clint growling "You
don't want to know," they're not telling. Here, the gang members
who persecute Toad also rape his sister, even though at least
some of them are supposed to be family members. If the gang
exists in the first place, as the movie hints it does, as
protection for the Hmong against rival gangs of other
ethnicities, why would they rape their own kind? Why would Toad
not want to join them in protecting his people from the black and
Hispanic gangs?
One answer to the latter question, at least, is that Toad is a
wimp. Indeed, Walt is supposed to take him on as a protégé
precisely in order "to man you up a little bit. Get a little
carbon off the valves." Even Walt's incessant racial slurs are
meant to be seen as nothing but a form of distinctively masculine
banter, a subset of the jokey insults he routinely trades with
his male friends, which must be taught to the boy along with the
use of the tools of manhood put on display for his benefit.
Subsequently, the guns and the car and the power tools are joined
by WD-40, a vice grip, and a roll of duct tape with which, as
Walt tells Toad, "any man worth his salt can fix almost any
problem." Now the fatherless Toad is presumably equipped to take
on the world.
But in the end, the most potent of these masculine tools turn out
not to be for use -- or not for use by anyone without Walt's
psychic scars and the moral authenticity they give him.
Presumably their magic powers have to be circumscribed, lest Toad
end up either dead or a psychological basket case and moral
anachronism like Walt, who suddenly sees in the persecuted Toad's
gang-banging dilemma a path to redemption for himself. For in
spite of his apparent dislike of Christianity, Walt chooses a
Christ-like solution to the problem of the neighborhood bad-boys,
with the result that Toad and Sue and their charming family may
at last be allowed to live in peace -- at least if that turns out
to be all right with the black and Hispanic gangs. We're not
informed about that.
In other words, the movie is typical late Eastwood with a
clunking moral familiar to anyone who has kept coming back to his
work in the hope that Dirty Harry might, at long last and very
late in the day, put in another appearance. In Gran
Torino he leads us right up to the brink of a Dirty Harry
moment, only to whisk the football away at the last minute,
Lucy-like, in order to give us the by-now familiar
anti-"violence" message of his movies since Unforgiven
(1992). As in Unforgiven, the hero has a secret sorrow,
a deed or deeds of violence in his past of which he is ashamed
and for which he is in search of absolution. As in Mystic
River (2003), violence never solves anything. As in
Million Dollar Baby (2004) the Catholic Church is
depicted as naive and feckless. As in Flags of Our
Fathers (2006), there is no heroism except in victimhood.
Yeah, yeah. But wouldn't even the liberals he is sucking up to
like to see Dirty Harry again anyway?
topics:
Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry
