In my last post I said that Slumdog Millionaire was the best film I saw before the Oscars.  That’s true, BUT, Gran Torino was easily my favorite film from last year.  If you saw the trailer and thought that this looked like a geriatric version of the old-school Clint Eastwood butt kicking movies you’d be well within reason to do so.  But that’s the tricky thing about trailers, a great one piques your interest without giving away the story and terrible ones mine the best stuff from the movie leaving you dissapointed at the theatre.  The trailer for Gran Torino tells you part of a much larger much more impressive story.  And if the grumpy old racist who’s quick to pull a rifle out to defend his front lawn didn’t get you into the theatres the rest of the story should have, so take it from me – go to the theatre this week to catch it while it’s still out.

[spoilers ahead]

Is Clint Eastwood a grumpy old racist quick to draw his rifle in Gran Torino?  Yes.  But there is oh so much more.  Eastwood is one of those people that gets an automatic pass from me.  I’ll go see any project he’s involved with, I’ll give any Eastwood film a chance.  I mean he has been on a ROLL since 2003’s Mystic River and he’s just been in so many good films he’s always worth the benefit of the doubt.

So one cold January night I drug my wife to the theater and sat there with a few hundred retirees (seriously we were the youngest people in the theater by about 30 years!) to see what story Clint Eastwood would have for us.  Gran Torino turned out to be an incredibly powerful story of Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet who has watched the world litterally change around him.  Walt never left the home he and his wife had in suburban Michigan like the rest of the whites had and after she dies he finds himself the lone white man in a Hmong neighborhood, emphasis on the hood.  When Walt breaks up a fight between some gangsters and his neighbor’s son, Thao, by showing up with his war rifle, the Hmong neighbors exalt him as a community hero.  Walt says he simply didn’t want anyone on his lawn and gruffly reject the gifts and praise, but his neighbors persist.  One in particular, Thao’s older sister Sue, shows up on Walt’s porch and makes it a point to educate him on Hmong culture.  Sue is persistent and draws Walt out of his grumpy isolation and into an unlikely friendship with his neighbors, especially with Thao.  Thao is a prime recruit for the local gang and Walt rescues him from being initated and takes the young boy under his wing.  And this is what makes Gran Torino my favorite film from last year.  Walt Kowalski is not a nice guy.  Walt is not sensitive, he drinks too much, he swears all the time, he is pretty darned racist and yet… his relationship with Thao is so beautiful it brought me to tears.