My Thoughts on Gran Torino
I'm a huge Clint Eastwood fan. As an actor, yes, but primarily as a director. The question of what my favorite film is, though not one I like to answer, has been replied to with Unforgiven more and more frequently over the years. I've come to expect great things, for the most part, when going to a one of Eastwood's films, and between Million Dollar Baby and Letters From Iwo Jima, he's produced two of the strongest films of the decade.
But he slips up sometimes. Blood Work was almost unwatchable, and Flags Of Our Fathers was well-intentioned, but muddled and forgettable. So I'm aware that Eastwood is capable of failing to meet up to his own potential. Unfortunately, Gran Torino does not continue the high standard of his better recent films. This surprised me, because it's actually been very well received. The American Film Institute named it as one of the ten best films of the year. After seeing the film, I'm really not sure why. The script reminded me of a cross between the worst aspects of Crash paired with the aforementioned Blood Work, a mash-up of tired jokes about getting old and a shallow exploration of racism. The relationships in the film are poorly developed, and some of the characters are written inconsistently. The worst example of this dynamic would be the character of the priest, inserted into the story seemingly to provide moral and thematic balance, but instead muddling and confusing the film.
Despite all of these factors, I recommend the film because it actually works, and the reason for this is Clint Eastwood, and him alone. His performance is layered, deep and emotional, a big surprise when weighed against how sparsely the character is written. Along with his emotion comes a surprising amount of humor, and it surprisingly serves to enhance the rest of the film rather than distract from it. This performance combines with skillful direction to make the film turn out to be slightly more than the sum of its parts, even though those parts don't add up to very much in the first place.
