|
At 78, Clint Eastwood has marinated so long in his own badass that he's become hilarious. Just like how Bill Murray has become so funny that it's a little sad (after all, who can make the world's funniest man laugh?), Clint's toughness is so unprecedented that it short circuits our mortal minds and makes us act inappropriately. In Gran Torino, when Clint shoves his old M1 rifle into a Hmong gangbanger's face and tells him, in a voice made of dinosaur bones and cigarette ashes, "We used to stack fucks like you five feet high in Korea and use you for sandbags," nervous laughter is the only response your befuddled psyche can conjure up in the face of such unfathomable, nearly Lovecraftian hardass.
It's a coping mechanism, a safety valve, for to look head on into Clint's slate-hard stare is to invite complete ego implosion. Despite the evidence before your eyes, your mind tells you that people simply aren't supposed to be that tough. We're just made of meat and hair. But people aren't Clint. He's better than that. He's older than God, he's got two Oscars, he plays jazz piano, he probably fucked your mother, and he can kill you with his face. So chuckle up, pussies, because that's all you're good for.  | I don't know if you get this from the preview, but Gran Torino is a very funny movie. Nearly every word that Clint says in the first 2/3 of the movie got a laugh from the audience I saw it with, which is a batting average I'm reasonably certain Jim Carrey would give a kidney and at least one testicle to achieve in any of his recent "comedies." Clint plays loveable racist Walt Kowalski, the crotchetiest old bastard who's ever drawn breath as if he had a grudge against it. His first line--muttered when he sees his granddaughter walk into his wife's funeral with her pierced bellybutton showing--is "Rrrrrr." It's a low rumble, like tectonic plates shifting a mile beneath the surface of the earth or a polar bear taking a painful dump. It's kind of his catchphrase. You can count the things Walt doesn't hate on one gnarly, liver-spotted hand. He doesn't hate his dog, Daisy. He doesn't hate Pabst Blue Ribbon. And he doesn't hate his '72 Gran Torino, a car he personally installed the steering column into when he worked on the Ford assembly line. He hates everything else. He hates his stupid family, a bunch of pillow-soft middle managers who want to put him in a home and use his "retro" furniture in their dorm rooms. He hates the new priest at his church, a wee ginger fuck who doesn't know dick about a man's life. He especially hates all the Asian immigrants who have turned his Detroit neighborhood into a ghetto. He's got more racial slurs for them than Eskimos got words for snow. He's a majestically grizzled sumbitch who engages in some of the most virtuosic motherfuckery you've ever seen. |
Personally, I think he's perfect the way he is, but because this is a movie, he's gotta learn a few of those life lessons the Brave Little Toaster was always talking about. To that end, he becomes friends with the Hmong family who lives next door. He doesn't mean to, though. It's just that these gangbangers knocked over a couple of his yard gnomes while they were trying to recruit this kid named Thao, so Walt's got no choice but to shove his army rifle up in their grills and growl, "I'll shoot you in the face and sleep like a baby." He doesn't do it for the Hmongs, though. He does it because those pricks fucked with his yard gnomes. The Hmongs don't listen, though, so they keep bringing him flowers and casseroles and shit to thank him. Luckily, that doesn't stop Walt from calling them zipperheads to their face. Then he accidentally becomes friends with Thao's sister, a cute-as-a-button chick who has some cutting words for some black dudes with Asian fetishes. When they get rough, Walt growls like a backfeeding septic pump and whips out his army-issue pistola, but not before he takes their collective manhood with just a few choice insults. (He also demoralizes the chick's wimpy, offay, soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, who thinks he can prevent a beatdown by wearing his hat sideways and saying "It's all good, bro.") The great part about Walt is that, like the Fonz, he never really has to do anything to prove how tough he is. He just says some shit that makes you wanna go sit fully clothed in an empty bathtub under a single bare light bulb, hugging your knees and rocking back and forth, maybe quietly muttering to yourself. I mean, he lunchboxes a guy proper later in the flick, but by that point, you already know he's the hardest motherfucker walking, just from the sound of his voice. It must hurt to talk like that. There ain't enough green tea with honey in the world to take the gravel out of that larynx. Anyway, so Walt starts mentoring Thao, teaching him how to be a man by calling dudes pollacks and bitching about people that ain't in the room. But then the gang retaliates and some fucked up shit happens, and Walt's gotta rethink his whole attitude about things. Does he go on a kill-crazy rampage like he's been dying to do the whole movie, or does he find another way to end this shit? Well, the answer is—and this is a spoiler, sort of, but it's the good kind, because it'll keep your expectations in check—he does not go all unforgiven on these assholes. And I never thought I'd say this, but this is the only movie I've ever seen where I'm actually glad that it didn't end with Clint putting bullets the size of Campbell's soup cans in motherfuckers' faces. (I include movies Clint's not even in on that list, as well, such as Un Chien Andalou and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) It's one of them poetic type endings that subverts the paradigm of eye-for-an-eye violence created by Dirty Harry and its endless line of urban action imitators. Or something like that. All I know is, it fits the story. Although I would have cheered if Clint spent the last 20 minutes of the flick revoking these pussy-ass gangbangers' Earth privileges, this is a much more mature and satisfying climax that makes you reassess what it means to be a badass in a particular time and place. It's a tearjerker of an ending that doesn't get too sentimental, because Walt would fucking hate that shit. He did what needed doing, ain't no need to get worked up over it. Just stay the fuck off his lawn.
|
|
Contact Mr Majestyk:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
