Cinema Mishmash

For any artist, the ideal must be the ability to choose any project and have the resources to pursue it, without compromise and, if desired, without collaboration. For the consumer, if you will, the ideal is an artist with that type of freedom who has the talent and daring to not waste the opportunity. In the realm of cinema, Clint Eastwood is one of a handful of filmmakers with abundant portions of both autonomy and talent, which is what makes more personal projects like Gran Torino so fascinating, and in this case, so enjoyable. Here Eastwood plays a character who is pure curmudgeon, a man whose unabashed bigotry, intolerance, and impatience steadily reveals its function as a shield against taking on regrets and insecurities, from the distant as well as recent past. The most remarkable thing about the film is that Eastwood is self-assured enough to take on his own persona, sweeping up every dusty speck of cliché about the characters he’s played throughout his career, putting them into a box, and smashing it to pieces with a wink and and a nod.

The central story involves the tenuous but dynamic relationship between Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski and his Hmong neighbors. And while the story works well with a cast of non-recognizable and non-professional actors, a man with Eastwood’s oeuvre had to know that he was getting uneven, if not outright poor, performances from Christopher Carley as Father Janovich and from Bee Vang as the teenage boy that Kowalski reluctantly takes under his wing. But a lot can be forgiven when Eastwood is the central actor in a film that is steadily gaining momentum toward a full-on revenge picture. And if there were ever a single song worthy of an award for its contribution to a film, the Eastwood-composed (and initially performed) “Gran Torino,” which plays during the closing credits, is that song – beautiful, catchy, and the perfect coda to the film’s unexpected finale.