Military Movies - Military Times

Always the tough guy

Many neighborhoods have a cranky, solitary old man who’s forever yelling at the local kids to get off his lawn. But few do so while aiming a locked and loaded vintage M1 rifle.

Meet Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), Korean War vet, newly minted widower, estranged father and grandfather, and retired 50-year man on the Ford assembly line, who now spends his days fulminating about the foreigners who are taking over his crumbling middle-class Detroit neighborhood.

Walt is fond of only three things: his Pabst Blue Ribbon, his old dog Daisy and his cherry 1972 Ford Gran Torino, which came off his own production line. He doesn’t drive it; he keeps it under wraps in his garage, a reminder of better, long-ago days.

He reserves his deepest animus, and his sharpest racial epithets, for the immigrants next door, a large and extended clan of Hmongs, the hill people of Southwest Asia. “Barbarians,” he growls as they come and go.

Walt’s sterile but stable life is shattered one night when he finds a member of that family, a shy, unassuming, fatherless teenager named Thao (Bee Vhang), in his garage, trying to boost his prized Gran Torino.

Turns out Thao was arm-twisted into this crime by some local Hmong thug wannabes, one a distant cousin. Afterward, Thao’s older sister Sue (Ahney Her) drags her brother to Walt’s house and insists on making restitution. And so for a couple of weeks, Walt has Thao do odd jobs around his house — and the unlikeliest of friendships forms between Walt, Thao and Sue.

The Hmong culture is not traditionally matriarchal, but the women clearly wear the pants in this extended family. Walt is nonplussed — and amused — by Sue’s readiness to smack his guff right back at him.

“Don’t you be looking at my dog, now,” he growls at her.

“Don’t worry, we only eat cats,” she retorts with a grin.

Thao, however, is a tougher nut — a bright kid who is painfully lacking any semblance of social skills. In the only scene in the film played strictly for laughs, Walt takes Thao to his longtime local barber (John Carroll Lynch) with the goal of teaching him the peculiar art of “guy speak.”

For a while, it’s unclear where rookie screenwriter Nick Schenk is taking this story. But it comes into focus as the Hmong thugs let it be known they’re not going to leave Thao and his family alone. A reckoning looms, and Walt, who carries a secret guilt for something he did during the war, will be in the thick of it.

This being a Clint movie, you know it’s likely to end in violence. And it does — but in a shockingly unexpected way that I believe marks a first for its star, followed by a bittersweet but powerfully moving coda. And you can almost hear Eastwood, who also directed and produced this film, issuing a gravelly chuckle as he smacks audiences upside the head.

It’s impossible to imagine this tale without Eastwood in the title role, and it’s not difficult to see what attracted him to it.

Although Walt Kowalski was never a cop, he is just as much a revisionist version of the Dirty Harry character as Will Munny in “Unforgiven” was a revisionist version of all the nameless gunslingers Eastwood played in his younger days.

“Gran Torino” continues the truly remarkable sunset run of one of the most singular careers in film history, and shows that at 78 years old, Eastwood is still cranking long balls out of the park.