Eastwood closes acting career with a triumphant farewell

A story of ethnic bigotry that is as darkly tragic as it is occasionally hilarious, “Gran Torino” serves as a grand finale to Clint Eastwood’s acting career. Eastwood, who also directed and wrote the music, has announced this is his last acting job. At 78, he will continue directing.

As such, it is a triumphant farewell that could well win him the Oscar next month. (He has won twice for directing.) If he does,  it cannot be written off as a sentimental vote. Eastwood’s creation of the grouchy, racist Walt Kowalski hints at how funny he can be at the same time he brings  dignity to a role. His humor has often been stymied by box-office demands for tough-guy violence. 

Kowalski is a far cry from “Dirty Harry” Callahan or  the Man With No Name. Walt is a Korean War veteran who has spent his life working hard and believing in “the American way.” Before retiring, he worked on a Ford assembly line, one of the working men now threatened by the economic crisis.

But Walt is a vocal racist with a particular hatred for Asians, the people who have taken over his neighborhood. We first meet him coming back from the burial of his saintly wife, a woman who obviously had to put up with a lot. He wants only to be left alone with his dog, his guns and his Pabst Blue Ribbon. His spends his days sitting on his front porch snarling and squinting at the neighbors.

Anyone who has been around the older generation of working men in this country will recognize some of them in this character. He is politically incorrect in every possible way. (Another critic told me he threw the review disc out because he didn’t want to have it in his  home.)

Walt is something of an Archie Bunker, only darker, more believable and a good deal more involving. There are those who will say “Gran Torino” is simplistic and predictable in its ending. Still, it is an important film, a mirror held up to us all – a cracked one. We respect his place as a member of a generation that fought its own battles and believes itself right, even when it wasn’t.

Walt is sometimes hilarious, but he’s never very likable in a conventional way. He has nothing but contempt for his sons and their children. He’s contemptuous of the church and the fresh-faced priest who keeps showing up to try to save his soul.

But most of all, Walt hates the Laotians who have moved next door. They are the Hmongs.

Walt’s proudest possession is the 1972 Gran Torino that he keeps in his garage. He’s owned it since he worked on it at the Ford plant. He gets out his  M-1 the night he discovers the neighbor teenage boy, Thao Lor, trying to steal the car. The boy, played somewhat stiffly by amateur Bee Vang, was put up to the caper by a threat from the local gang. His family is ashamed and forces the lad to do work for Walt to make up for the deed.

Eastwood plays all this with grumpy conviction. The script puts him in danger when he is won over too easily by the good cooking of his next-door neighbor. A winning buffer, though, is the feisty and smart sister, Sue, who is tough enough to stand up to his slurs and forces him to see her family as people.

Walt teaches the shy boy about girls and becomes a staunch defender of the family.

This would all be pretty corny if Eastwood weren’t so good. It is ironic that he has such a saintly image this late in his career because, if you think about it, he has done as much as any other star in promoting the violence that rules film culture. Eastwood and the late Paul Newman changed the way movies look at heroism. With his creation of the anti-hero, audiences no longer respected the good guy. The only bad guy in modern movies became the guy who got caught .

Yet, we should remember that Eastwood, even in his early career, often tried gentler, folksier films, but “Honkytonk Man” (1982) and “Bronco Billy” (1980) were box-office flops. He tried everything from comedy (“Every Which Way but Loose,” 1978) to musicals (“Paint Your Wagon,” 1969) and directing “Bird” (1988), the biography of the jazz great. That’s him singing his own  theme song over the final credits of “Gran Torino.”

This outing has a dark ending like his “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), but perhaps not as convincing. He won Oscars for directing “Baby” and the anti-Western Western “Unforgiven” (1992) and could just as deservedly won for the masterful “Mystic River” (2003). Here, he uses flat, bright colors and a quiet, leisurely pace to suggest the ordinariness of Walt’s life. Few directors would dare to be this subtle about such a simple story.

Then there’s that performance.

Formidable in his biased beliefs and tough American work ethnic, Walt Kowalski is a character to remember. It’s a performance rivaled only by the Civil War soldier Eastwood played in “The Beguiled” (1971).

It’s going to be tough for Oscar to turn him down.  

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347,  mal.vincent@pilotonline.com