Gran Torino

There are those rare movies that you walk out of feeling somehow changed by the experience. The movies that wonder how anyone could possibly find a fault or a reason to dislike. So it is with this movie.


It is not a minor entry in Clint Eastwood's body of work so much as it is a brilliant and powerful eulogy, a fitting statement, and a final and glorious seal on a career.


I say this as an often finicky movie watcher. Very few movies move me, and even many of the very prominent critical hits, such as "No country for Old Men", "The Last King of Scotland", "Children of Men" and others of the like fail to move me precisely because I feel like they are trying too hard to do just that, and that by doing that they lose their natural feel and I no longer feel like I'm in someone's life, but in a great, overactive melodrama meant to tear at my emotions.


This movie was different. Maybe because of my perspective I saw in the character a more natural edge than the many reviewers in Boston and elsewhere that decried its racial language. As a southern I'd heard the words before, and knew people who fit the character to a tee, so perhaps he seemed far more real and far more natural a character to me than he did others. I'm not hardened, and I'm not cynical, perhaps that is why I enjoyed the movie as much as I did.


I cannot put into words how much I liked Gran Torino. Clint Eastwood's performance is spectacular; his character his somehow tough and gruff but still moving and sympathetic. The entire cast was spectacular, and everything clicked. The script was fantastic, never overplaying its hand for a moment. Bright moments of comedy sprinkle in it, the gradual character development and "opening" up of Eastwood's character just suck you up into it. The bright portions of the movement shine all the more brightly and move one all the more strongly because of the blaring darkness inherent in the rest. The tragic ending moved me to tears, only the second movie ever to do so, (the other was Schindler's List), but it too was beautiful in its own way. The movie became a story of a selfless sacrifice made by an all too normal and human man.


It wasn't vintage Eastwood, beyond the spitting. Only one shot is fired by Eastwood in the movie, and that by accident, and he does not kill anyone in the movie, also a first for Eastwood. Its setting is so much different, and little connects to the westerns that have defined his career. His character seems to have finally evolved with age; his character, in the end, does not use violence in this movie, but sacrifices himself in order to stop the violence.


The memorial service at the end of the movie was altogether eeiry, but highly symbolic too. And the low humming of Eastwood at the end of the movie, as the Gran Torino rides alongside the ocean, is like a camera fading slowly out of view. The tune is soft, and rough, but somehow sad and bittersweet in itself, a few simple notes humming together the sadness of life and the human experience, a soft and steady conclusion to a soft and steady movie, an elegant movie, a movie of laughter, sadness and happiness, a movie of life and stuggle, a movie about sacrifice and love, a movie about humanity.