Grand
Gestures
by
Howard Schumann
Walt Kowalski is a retired autoworker and Korean War veteran
living in a decaying neighborhood near Detroit, Michigan, in Clint Eastwood’s
Gran Torino. Like Dirty Harry and Bill Munny
before him, Kowalski (Eastwood) is an individualist who answers to no
one and whose racism and anti-social behavior is the way he deals with
frustration, in this case, minorities and Asian immigrants in the community.
When local gangs threaten Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang), the young son of
a large family of Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia, however, Kowalski’s
cranky individualism is challenged in a way that compels him to reach
out and transcend his misanthropic veneer.
The film
opens with Kowalski at the funeral of his wife showing disdain for the
manners of his two grandsons. His scowling and growling carries over
to the young priest, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) who promised
Walt’s wife that he would look after him after her death and make
him go to confession. Kowalski abruptly dismisses Janovich, saying that
he knows nothing about life and death and telling him: “I confess
that I have no desire to confess to a boy just out of the seminary!”
Walt’s prickly attitude is equally directed to his two sons and
especially to his neighbors, a Hmong family consisting of a grandmother,
mother, and her two children, Sue (Ahney Her), and Thao. Walt is an
equal opportunity bigot, calling the members of the family everything
from pagans to gooks and other choice epithets unsuitable for print.
When pressure
to join an Asian gang prompts Thao to try and steal Kowalski’s
immaculately maintained 1972 Gran Torino, Walt discovers him in his
garage and menacingly points a rifle in his face. Later, however, the
old man flashes his M-1 rifle to protect Thao from being hurt in a gang
disturbance that spills over onto his lawn and, in gratitude his neighbors
bring food and flowers. Later, Sue invites him to their house for food
and drink which he accepts, discovering in the process that he has more
in common with these people than with members of his own family. Reluctantly,
Walt finds himself becoming more and more involved with his Hmong neighbors
and seems to drop his posturing when he is around Sue, who acts as a
guide and translator.
He rises
to the occasion by helping Thao make amends for his attempted larceny
by giving him jobs to do around his house, teaching him about tools,
and using his contacts from having worked for thirty years at a Ford
plant to help him get a job with a construction company. The local thugs
are not finished, however, and eventually it becomes time for a final
confrontation with the gang and for Walt, never answerable to anyone
except himself, a grand gesture. Gran Torino is impeccably
acted by the entire cast, including some who have never acted before,
and Eastwood’s performance is one of his best.
To
its credit, the film suggests that people have the capacity to change
and transform their life. As Walt discovers the humanity of his neighbors,
he gets in touch with his own as well. Unfortunately, the film tends
to glorify “rugged individualism” and vigilantism at the
expense of acting responsibly in a community. Walt’s idea of “manning
up” young Thao is to train him to use ethnic epithets when dealing
with local merchants as in the scene where Thao is put through the paces
with a local barber. It does not occur to Eastwood, however, that being
manly might lie more in working to ameliorate the problems that have
led to the deterioration of the neighborhood than in macho posturing
or hurling insults.
Stephen
Daldry’s The Reader is based on a novel
by Bernhard Schlink that grew out of an experience from his youth when
he discovered that the teacher he had admired for his love of literature
had a darker past. Shown through the lens of memory by an adult lawyer
(Ralph Fiennes), the film is set in Berlin, thirteen years after the
end of World War II. A fifteen-year old boy, stricken with a sudden
illness in an apartment doorway on his way home from school is assisted
by an older woman. Six months after his recuperation from scarlet fever,
the boy returns with flowers. After the woman provides a bath for him
to clean up from shoveling coal, he is initiated into sex. The woman
is Hanna (Kate Winslet) who collects fares on the local streetcar and
the boy is Michael Berg (David Kross), who returns every afternoon.
Hanna also has a strange obsession: she wants to be read to.
Michael eagerly
complies, reading The Odyssey, The Lady With the Little
Dog by Chekhov, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and
even Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she objects to. Then,
one day she disappears without explanation and the film flashes forward
eight years. Michael is in law school, and his class, led by their teacher
Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz) is observing the trial of Nazi war criminals.
To his horror, Michael observes that Hanna is one of six co-defendants,
all former guards at concentration camps who, by their inaction, allowed
three hundred Jews to be burned to death in a bombed church. He has
to face the trauma of not only seeing his first love after many years
but also finding out that she was perhaps the woman most responsible
for the deaths of the prisoners the guards were assigned to watch.
Adapted
for the screen by David Hare, The Reader has an important story
to tell, allowing us to gauge the reaction of the younger generation
in postwar Germany to revelations of Nazi complicity among their elders.
Unfortunately, however, I found it to be strangely flat and lifeless,
undercut by an air of portentous self-importance and peopled with characters
whose complexities and contradictions are never fully illuminated.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
