So the pressing question before us today is, “Up versus Gran Torino: which of the two movies (one in theaters, the other just released on DVD) about the cantankerous widowed old coot who’s attached to his house and who finds himself, in the golden glow of his autumn years, with a pesky Asian kid in his face? (I think the guy in Gran Torino also had a dog, come to think of it, but it’s been six months since I saw the goddamn thing and I’m not trusting to memory on that. In any case, I’m absolutely positive that Clint Eastwood’s dog didn’t talk, so Torino would have lost that round before the bout even started.) For a decisive winner to be declared, it must be possible to demonstrate that one contestant has it all over the other both in terms of general excellence in filmmaking and entertainment value, and in the message that it brings to a nation starved for moral instruction. (Normally, I’d soft-pedal that aspect of the whole thing, but in this case, I have been moved by Manohla Dargis’s review of Gran Torino in The New York Times, where she took the position that we have to cut Clint Eastwood some slack while he’s here and making movies that attempt, in however Paleolithic a manner, to engage in contemporary American life, because we were mean to Stanley Kramer and his “earnest middlebrow entertainments” when he was making them, and look what happened. I guess he died or something. I would never celebrate the death of a bad movie director–I mean, unless he’d suffered a stroke or something while about to swing a tire iron at my face, which is a situation I find it disturbingly easy to picture–but I will just note that, whether he died or just went into seclusion because he was tired of being bad-mouthed by snots like me, Stanley Kramer got a lot quieter at some point after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and whatever brought it on, quiet turned out to be a good look for him.
As for the subject at hand: Up is a rollicking, non-stop fun ride with talking dogs–you just can’t over-emphasize that part–and yet a heart-breaking tribute to the idea of a perfect, two-sided, balanced lifelong romantic love of the kind that stretches and expands both partners, making them more than they could have ever become on their own. Incidentally, I saw it with my pal David Rothschild, and the conclusion of the opening section had him in tears, and Rothschild is one of those guys who likes to extinguish his cigars on the outstretched hands of homeless beggars, offering them only such solace as they can take from his booming laughter, which goes “MWAHH-HAH-HA!!” (My cup does not runneth over when it comes to selecting the people willing to resist the attractions of speed dating for one night to watch a 3-D cartoon with me.) On the other hand, Gran Torino is over-long, dragging its mangy, flea-bitten ass across the screen like a crippled mule, over-obvious, heavy-handed, joyless, crummy, shitty-looking, very poorly acted, and provides an ill-chosen setting for its director-star’s demonstration of how little his singing has improved since Paint Your Wagon. On the other hand, it does give you the chance to see Eastwood ask a roomful of unoffending Asian bit players, “What’re you looking at, zipperheads?” Oh wait, that’s still the same hand.
For purposes of candor, and to help anyone who’s still struggling with the math on this, I should probably ‘fess up and make it clear that I do not like Clint Eastwood, not as a director nor as an actor. (Forty-odd years ago, as a unreflective but photogenic movie star, he had his uses.) I will even go so far as to say that the move to retag him as a great, if not the greatest living, American filmmaker strikes me as the single worst and most wrong-headed act of “reconsideration” committed by movie critics in my lifetime, with the possible exception of the Criterion Collection edition of Alex Cox’s Walker. When I bad-mouthed Million Dollar Baby at the Screengrab, some wayward, lost soul wrote in to charge me with “kneejerk contrarianism”, which, except for the time some idiot accused me of not having seen some piece of shit I’d made fun of–on the theory, I guess, that there was just no way I could have seen it and not loved it to death–is the only comment I remember getting in two years at the Screengrab that made me angry. (That includes the guy who invited me to lick his nut sack as punishment for having been too nice to Harold Pinter when I wrote Pinter’s obituary. I probably was too nice to him. It was his obituary, and he did just have to go and die on Christmas Day. But it’s nice to learn that some of our readers there never did think I was consistently mean enough.) I’ve hated Clint Eastwood and his movies for most of my life. You might think this means I’m stupid, but there’s no call for accusing me of pretending that I hate them just to be difficult. I’m perfectly capable of coming up with opinions that the whole rest of the world thinks are nuts, and doing it all on my own, regardless of where this places me in relation to the rest of the world, let alone that segment of the Internet community who are so doggedly supportive of what they perceive to be the collective wisdom that anything else offends them personally as an act of “contrarianism”.
But enough for the mystic chords of memory. In Gran Torino. Eastwood plays a hateful, racist old bastard who is disdainful of the Asian immigrants moving in around him but whose creaky old heart softens a tad when he learns that some Asians are even worse than others, and that if he doesn’t step in to do something about the really rotten, violent, thuggish Asians, the sweeter, more hapless Asian kid next door will be unable to be protect himself from being drawn into the web. The contrast between Up is pretty clear: in the Pixar film, the old dude who thinks that his life has ended after his wife dies, and who can only make whatever life he has left mean anything by a series of gestures designed to make it seem that he’s extending his time with her, winds up having the adventures he dreamed of as a kid. But his time spent defying death in the jungle turns out to be a transitional phase for him. It’s what he has to go through so that he can let someone else into his life and embrace the somewhat less chaotic but no less nerve-wracking adventure of participating in a child’s growing up. In my half-assed telling, it probably sounds a lot mushier than it plays. But Gran Torino strikes me as far more sentimental and a good deal less sane. Its message is that the old weirdo played by Eastwood has no place left in this world. It’s just as Lou Dobbs would say: the foreigners really are crowding him out. So he learns to accept that, and he tries to educate the best of them in how to be good Americans, and then he administers justice the best way he now can, by offering himself up to the bad guys as a sacrificial victim.
Almost thirty-five years ago, in a review of The Outlaw Josey Wales, Richard Schickel wrote that “One man’s classicism, however, is another man’s cliché,” then made it clear that, for him, Eastwood’s devotes to action-movie cliches made him a new classic: “In a western, where spacious landscapes and historical distance seem to soften the impact of his brutal methods of problem solving, Eastwood is not simply a symbol of the modern taste for random and gratuitous bloodletting in films. Rather, he reminds us of a traditional American style of screen heroism—a moral man slow to rile but wonderfully skilled when he must finally enforce his conception of right and wrong. In these moments, he links us pleasingly, satisfyingly with our movie pasts, rekindles briefly a dying glow.” Yeah, whatever. Eastwood’s original starring vehicles (for real directors, like Sergio Leone and Don Siegel) turned the classic Westerner inside out, first by presenting him as a cold-blooded mercenary and then by transplanting him to a contemporary urban setting where his uncanny ability to pick out whoever in a crowd needed shooting had unsettling political overtones that Eastwood has been in denial against ever since.
He started to win over those critics not automatically attracted to “classic” cliches with movies like Tightrope and now Gran Torino, which are supposed to amount to a self-aware “examination” of whatever was creepy and unhealthy about his urban-killer icon. (Old Walt, the hero of Gran Torino, has a friendly name-calling scene with a fellow old white guy that, like the “Harry hates everybody” scene early in Dirty Harry, is meant to establish that his racist diatribes are just good fun, which we could all engage in if the rest of us weren’t so lily-livered in our desire to seem politically correct. At the movie’s core–at Eastwood’s core–is a yearning desire to return to Archie Bunker’s neighborhood.) Lacking depth and style and hampered by his own shallowness as an actor, Eastwood’s image-conscious movies look less like self-examination than spin control to me, of the sort that Schwarzenegger indulged in when he realized that he’d wear out his welcome as an action lug even faster if he didn’t mix in an occasional Twins or Kindergarten Cop. (As such flops as Bronco Billy, Pink Cadillac and City Heat demonstrated, Eastwood doesn’t have the option of charming the crowds with his flair for light comedy, unless he can arrange to co-star with an orangutan.) If you cried for Eastwood in Josey Wales, maybe you can cry for him in Gran Torino, but the cartoon Ed Asner makes for a better movie and a better role model.
–Phil Nugent
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