"Gran Torino" maintains the quality of Clint Eastwood's Oscar-decorated run that includes "Unforgiven," "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
The new film, about a bigoted widower who's all but given up on the modern world, is a sterling back-to-basics, intimate character study.
Eastwood, 78, both directs and attacks the starring role with relish.
He becomes an aged Dirty Harry, a lone wolf who takes justice into his own hands and stares society down with the stink eye. Eastwood etches the character in your mind with a slew of priceless affectations and a handful of stinging one-liners.
Shot on location in Highland Park, Mich., a run-down burg surrounded by Detroit, "Gran Torino" peeks in at Walt Kowalski (Eastwood), a defiant Korean War vet whose wife has just died.
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Walt hates everything he sees around him — the decaying neighborhood and its residents (he mutters epithets at his Asian neighbors, Hmong people from Southeast Asia), his self-absorbed family members who hover around him out of obligation, and that craggy face that stares back at him when he looks into the mirror.
Walt's racism spawns from his resistance to change. He barks like a mangy dog at everything that doesn't live up to his fuzzy memories of the way things used to be. He calls things they way he sees them, using language unfiltered by social standards or decorum.
Most of what Walt does is out of sheer defiance. He manicures his lawn because the houses around him have fallen into disrepair. He stares down all comers and isn't afraid to beat up an 18-year-old gangbanger, damn the consequences.
When he doesn't like something he hears, which is often, he snarls and spits.
Just how old-fashioned is Walt? He still reads newspapers.
Largely out of boredom and curiosity, he gets involved with his neighbors, including the sheepish Thao (Bee Vang), whom a Hmong gang is attempting to recruit, and Thao's sister, Sue (Ahney Her).
A plot twist involving the gang's coveting of Walt's pristine 1972 Ford Gran Torino forces Thao and Walt to grow closer, with Walt begrudgingly taking the boy under his wing to "man him up," as he puts it.
Thao soaks up Walt's instruction, doing chores and learning to use tools. In a film peppered with charming comedy, the scene in which Walt tries to teach Thao the art of trash talking at a shop run by a hard-nosed barber (John Carroll Lynch) stands out.
"Gran Torino" packs a heck of a wallop as the threads of its story — particularly Walt's reluctant kinship with a neophyte priest (Christopher Carley) — coalesce into a powerful finale.
Just like Walt's Gran Torino, Eastwood's engine is still purring as well as it did in '72.
Gran Torino
****
• Rated: R for language throughout, and for violence.
• Cast: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, Christopher Carley.
• Director: Clint Eastwood.
• Family call: Not for kids.
• Running time: 116 minutes.
