Gran Torino (2008): A

It’s almost a bit sad to say that in a career that has spanned over 50 years and many classics, it’s unlikely any part of what came before will be remembered as vividly as the last five years have been in the eyes of critics and movie buffs when it comes to Clint Eastwood. That would effectively leave out The Man With No Name of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Dirty Harry Callahan of Don Siegel’s actioner, that outlaw Jolsey Wales, and even Eastwood’s finest film as either actor or director, the Oscar-winning “Unforgiven.”

Typing that last part, I think Eastwood’s legacy will be fine. But such is the impressiveness of his late-career surge since 2003’s “Mystic River”- which has resulted in five Oscar nominees, and three Best Picture finalists (including 2004 winner “Million Dollar Baby”)- that it threatens to overshadow the decades before it. His latest addition to this crowning portion of his career is “Gran Torino,” which tweaks the Eastwood persona in a way that surprises and reaches new depths of storytelling for the icon. It’s one of his best films.

Clint plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet and former Ford line worker whose wife has just passed away. The young priest she went to in her later years (Christopher Carley, in a vivid performance that gets to the soul of an interesting observation about men of the cloth) promised her to get Walt to go to confession, but Walt signals immediately that it’s not gonna happen without a fight. Walt also signals his curmudgeonly manner early on at the wake at his house, grouchy about his family and not very forgiving when it comes to the Asian family living next door (and in fact, in his entire neighborhood). The racial slurs he throws their way are so studied and numerous one wonders whether he read up on the subject, or just became acutely aware of the possibilities when he was in Korea.

Well, through circumstances that you can sense in the film’s trailer, Walt begrudgingly is befriended by the Asians next door, even after the shy and impressionable Thao (Bee Vang) tries to steal his 1972 Gran Torino- a beautifully-maintained vehicle- for initiation into a gang. He gets himself in deeper when he defends the honor of their smart-mouthed daughter Sue (Ahney Her) when she finds herself harassed by a group of blacks in the wrong side of town.

To say that the film takes plenty more left turns from there is putting it lightly. Working from a not-so-polished script by Nick Schenk, Eastwood creates a fascinating ensemble piece out of what appears- at the surface- to be a one man show. The unknowns and character actors in central roles sometimes seem to be outmatched when faced with the icon (although in the case of Vang, that’s an advantage for the performance, as Walt takes it upon himself to show Thao how to be a real man in life), but the key performances surrounding Clint- namely, Carley’s parish priest and Her’s delightfully speak-her-mind Sue (please tell me she was sixth for Best Supporting Actress voting this year?)- illuminate some of the key elements that has made “Gran Torino” the biggest hit of Clint’s career.

That’s a curious thought, also, especially when you consider that Walt is unforgivably, unapologetically racist at his core at the start of the film, not to mention so stand-offish with his family that when he calls his one son’s house late in the movie, his son does everything to speed the conversation along, leaving them both to wonder what just happened after the phone’s been hung up. But Eastwood’s gifts as a storyteller turn the film into a case study in change that never feels forced (Walt doesn’t give in easily, and in fact has a positive influence on those around him in ways we could never see coming in the trailer), while also looking at life, death, morality, and violence with the same unnerving eye that he cast on the subjects in the Best Picture winners “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby,” as well as “A Perfect World,” “Mystic River,” and his twin WWII films from 2006 “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

What might take so many viewers by surprise in “Gran Torino” in particular is the ending, which is as clear-cut in what Eastwood- whose Walt is a crowning achievement for the actor- is saying with it as anything he’s done. I liked the unexpectedness of it, and what it said about Walt, who never thought twice to pick up a gun before, but now sees that there’s another way. Considering it as I write this last part, I was reminded of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” which also centered around an old man who came to see a way at finding peace in his later life by doing what didn’t come naturally before. If you know that film, you might see more than a little in common with what Eastwood has accomplished in “Gran Torino,” and how Walt and Watanabe- the clerk in Kurosawa’s masterpiece- are, in a way, cut from the same cloth. It’s not hard to imagine Eastwood’s film eventually being seen as an unlikely hallmark in a career full of them, much like “Ikiru” is to Kurosawa.

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