Clint Eastwood and "Gran Torino."

By David Hudson on 01/02/2009

Film Comment's Evan Davis moderates a panel on Clint Eastwood. The participants: Ed Gonzalez, Akiva Gottlieb, Kent Jones, Kevin Lee and Karina Longworth. This online listening tip is reason enough to revisit "Gran Torino" via a few more reviews that've appeared since that last entry.

"Clint Eastwood's movie posters over the last couple of decades feature an almost invariable iconography," notes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot: "film after film, one one-sheet after another, a choleric Eastwood (or sometimes just his floating head) squints out from a black backdrop, half his likeness lost in shadows. Even without knowledge of the films themselves, we understand what these images stress: that, almost without exception, every Eastwood character - from Blondie to Bill Munny and beyond - has a skeleton in his closet. The Man With No Name is discernibly a Man With a Past, as is every successive incarnation of the Outlaw Clint Eastwood - disappointment, failure, and wrongdoing are wrought into the lines of his face, like the mole perched above his upper lip."

"After his recent punishing run of downbeat dramas, Eastwood must have been in a nostalgic mood. (Or maybe he, too, sat through 'Changeling' and decided enough of this Oscar crap already.)" Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly: 'Whatever the case, 'Gran Torino' finds Eastwood pulling double duty behind and in front of the camera, sputtering, spitting and cussing his way through his most baroquely gravel-voiced performance since ['Heartbreak Ridge']."

Updated through 1/6.

"The ambivalent way Eastwood views his own character hardly makes this film a lefthanded gesture, any more than the comparable ambivalence in his view of the macho director in ['White Hunter Black Heart'] had anything minor about it," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "The underplayed final scene of 'White Hunter' may even be for me the most perfectly realized moment in Eastwood's work to date. And despite the fact that 'Gran Torino' is relatively bombastic, Eastwood's performance in it seems no less measured and considered."

"Some of Eastwood's deconstructions of his Man with a Gun archetype are widely appreciated ('Unforgiven'); others, less so ('Magnum Force')," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "But they've generally shared a certain degree of sophistication. (I wrote about this at some length here.) Not any more. With 'Gran Torino,' Eastwood has taken what might have been the likable last gasp of his iconic persona and turned it into the dullest, most heavy-handed sermon of his career."

"[T]his is an Eastwood film to its core," writes Michael J Anderson, "calling his famed character-construction to account for the vigilantism that manifests itself both locally and across a forty-year corpus. Here, the solution of sacrifice becomes the fated consequence of a life's work, unavoidable as it is imperative within the film's narrative logic. Speaking of, revenge is shown less to be immoral in 'Gran Torino' (as it is represented in the similarly-revisionist 'Mystic River,' 2003) than tactically-ineffective. Either way, the vigilantism of 'Dirty Harry' (1971) et al continues to reveal unintended consequences. Eastwood extends his auto-critique."

"Avoiding the simplistic notions of good and evil that pitched 'Changeling' to a child's moral worldview," writes Andrew Schenker, "or the egregious piling up of calculated unpleasantness that turned 'Million Dollar Baby' from a mediocre boxing picture into an artless weepie, somehow managing to brutalize and insult its audience at the same time, 'Torino' creates a compelling moral testing ground, populates it with interesting and plausible characters and lets the consequences play out in complex, surprising ways."

"Eastwood announced that the role of Walt Kowalski in 'Gran Torino' will be his last, and he's left us a doozy to remember him by," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Updates, 1/5: "It's frankly hard to know what to make of this film," writes Ed Howard. "It's unrelentingly blunt and straight-faced for much of its length, and yet it's hard to take it entirely at face value. Its caricature of the tough-guy action hero as a nasty racist who actually says things like 'get off my lawn' - seriously, he couldn't have added 'hey, kids' at the beginning of that line? - demands to be taken seriously as an act of deconstruction, and yet so much of the dialogue that comes out of this walking stereotype is laughable or downright silly. Maybe that's the point."

Online viewing tips. Kevin Lee has put together a series of videos to accompany Film Comment's roundtable: "Changeling," "Gran Torino" and "Shots in the Dark."

Updates, 1/6: "'Gran Torino' squanders some of the penance it pays for Eastwood's previous directorial effort, the dully clunky 'Changeling,' by deciding that satirically comedic is unsustainable," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "It then goes and gets all leadenly heavy and redemptive instead."

"The film trades in cliché," writes Josef Braun. "It cheats here and there to get Walt to the finish line. But Walt himself, which is to say Eastwood the conservative closet humanist, is never less than riveting, and it's the throwaway moments he shares with his unexpected new friends that are the film's finest and most affecting."