Gran Torino

TRX
02-10-2012
muhammadarbab mentioned "Gran Torino", which is also one of my favorite films.

When I saw the movie I had no idea what it was about. I knew who Clint Eastwood was, but other than "Sudden Impact" I wasn't particularly impressed with any of his movies. I had never seen any of the previews or trailers of Gran Torino.

I thought the movie ROCKED. After seeing it I hit the web to see what other people thought. And what I found was... interesting. I wondered if there were two different movies out there with the same name; the most common review was something like "old racist guy committed suicide" or "movie made no sense."

America is not a monoculture, and virtually all of the popular media are controlled by a single group. So it's not unusual to see reviewers and comment threads with considerably different opinions than mine, but the sheer quantity and consistency of their lack of understanding of what they watched was surprising.

There seemed to be two problems. First, most of the viewers had the impression they were going to see a considerably different movie than what they got. I don't know if it was because it was an "Eastwood" movie or they had seen misleading trailers. I've been gypped by misleading trailers too, but it's like they never even watched the movie; just waited for what they expected and then got mad when they didn't get it. Second, particularly among younger Americans, anything with the least implication of racism is a hot button that turns people's brains off. Once they latch onto the "R word" there's no reasoning with them.

Still, it's one of those movies that I wound up thinking about a lot after we watched it. That's a good thing; how many movies have you seen where you still thought about it a week later? I gradually came to realize something that I had completely missed while watching the movie. It is an intensely *religious* movie. It's not just religious, it's a *Catholic* movie. And in modern America, many consider religion to be a dirty word and faith to be something to be ridiculed.

Eastwood's character was "Walt Kowalski." We learn from the movie that he was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. During the 1930s and 1940s when he was a boy, Detroit was home to many immigrant groups that stayed together and retained their ethnic identity. In this case, Kowalski's people were Polish Catholics. Even today, you can find neighborhoods in Detroit with signs in Polish. Kowalski served in the Korean War in the 1950s. We see one of his old uniforms; the patch is for the 10th Cavalry. 10Cav got *slaughtered* at Inchon. Their replacements got slaughtered. Many of the ones who made it back lived the rest of their lives in Army hospitals.

Walt Kowalski made it back, but his faith in God and his church did not. He had already been to Hell. He talked about climbing over piles of dead bodies. He dreamed about it every night for the rest of his life. He married, he had children, he was a productive member of society, but he had left something important behind in Korea.

As the movie begins he has once again rejected God. This priest, younger than his son, what does he know about life? About horror? Walter can confess his sins to him, and the priest can absolve him of the stain on his soul, but he has done it before. The church can forgive him for what he has done, but Walter finds no forgiveness in himself.

Walter is an old man now. His wife is dead. His children have no time for him. His friends are dead. His place; the neighborhood he has lived in all his life, all the people have died or moved away, and it is overrun by gooks, to him identical to the gooks the Army paid him to kill in Korea. All that horror, all those nights... and what was it for?

Walter goes to the doctor. He sits on the porch, coughing, spitting up blood. Sipping whisky. Waiting to die.

The movie develops. Walter gets to know his neighbors. The gooks are Cambodian immigrants, American allies relocated to Detroit after the Vietnam war. Walter takes an interest in this new community, but gangs are moving in and causing trouble.

Most of the Christian faiths offer forgiveness for sins. Forgiveness comes from God via the church. The Catholic faith also offers the idea of redemption. Redemption, as in most Catholic things, is complex, but you can view it as the opportunity to balance a sin by doing a good work. But unlike forgiveness, redemption is something you have to do for yourself.

The gangs have moved in, but they have managed to keep their level of crime and violence below the level that will make them a target for the police. Detroit is a bad place nowadays; a gang can get away with a lot before they become a big enough problem for the police to do something about it.

Walter Kowalski is 84 years old and coughing up blood. He's not going to go all Clint Eastwood into a nest of gangbangers with machine guns blazing. So he goads the gangbangers into killing him in public, where their crime can't be ignored. And the police finally have to move in and do something about cleaning them out.

The Catholic faith forbids suicide, but it specifically allows trading your life for the lives of others. Several of their saints got elevated for doing just that.

The movie ends, as it began, in the church.

But all a great many people took away from the movie was "racist" and "suicide."

Well, I guess that as with most things, you see what you are looking for.