Fri 20 Feb 2009 00.01 GMT First published on Fri 20 Feb 2009 00.

01 GMT

Bee Vang and Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino

Still potent ... Bee Vang and Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino
The Ford Gran Torino earned its footnote in pop culture history when a ketchup-red
75 model with a white racing stripe was featured every week in the TV cop show
Starsky and Hutch. The model shown here is an earlier vintage, 1972, and its
owner's glory days would appear to be from around the same era. This is widower,
retired car worker, military veteran and seething American patriot Walt Kowalski,
played with grandstanding gusto and unfakable star quality by Clint Eastwood.
(Eastwood also directs and produces.) Walt bought one of the Gran Torinos that he
helped to manufacture - "right off the line" - but keeps it in pristine condition
in the garage, while he rumbles around town in an old Ford pickup, glowering at
foreign automobiles and their disloyal American owners.

We join the story as the ageing Walt has just lost his wife and, at the funeral,
has to endure the supercilious homilies of a young priest (whose religion he
tolerated for his late wife's sake) along with the insolence and lack of respect
displayed by his smug grownup sons, both foreign-car owners, and their unspeakable
teenage children. The neighbourhood has gone all to hell, too. The house next door
is now owned by a Hmong family - a widespread South-east Asian minority - and Walt
does not trouble to distinguish them from the Koreans he fought in the 1950s, of
whom, we are later to learn, he despatched at least 13.

Walt is a racist; he is a resenter of the spooks, gooks and mooks, mentally lumped
in with all the local criminals and gangbangers around town who are undermining
decent values. The political becomes personal when Thao (Bee Vang), a shy, bookish
teenage boy who lives next door to Walt is bullied by his thuggish cousin and no-
good buddies into joining their gang. His initiation test is to bust into Walt's
garage and steal his treasured Gran Torino. Sure enough, Thao's incompetent
nocturnal raid triggers Walt's halogen security lights and Walt comes running with
the M1 assault rifle he keeps cleaned and ready - keen to bring his score up to 14.
The meeting of Walt and Thao is to change both their lives.

Eastwood's performance as Walt is a treat. No one could have animated the role like
this and no one else could conceivably have got away with the racist tirades,
reactionary arias and bigoted broadsides. He gets away with it because we know full
well that he is eventually going to reveal that great big bruised and hurting
heart-of-gold hidden under the faded grey T-shirt. Eastwood, at the age of 78, can
carry off the essentially comic combination of elderly mannerisms and cowboy
menace. He has his belt hitched up high like an old geezer and his short-sleeved
shirt reveals his wrinkly elbows, and his long senior-citizen forearms. Yet there
is something potent about his narrow-eyed gaze of righteous loathing, a facial tic
perhaps learned originally by leaning into a telescopic gunsight; it's a crinkling
of the eye muscles that also brings the corners of his mouth out into a silent
snarl. When relaxed, and even smiling, his face resembles the one shown on his
creased wedding photo: the one he had as a boy.

Very often, Walt communicates only in a soft growl, an inchoate version of the
whispery-croaky threats and insults that are his stock in trade. There is a bravura
moment when Walt rolls past in his pickup, just as black guys are threatening
Thao's smart, feisty cousin Sue (Ahney Her), while she is out walking with a local
white boy who ingratiatingly, and catastrophically, tries to affect gangsta style
to placate them. The cranky old grandpa faces them down and even pulls a gun, then
subtly establishes his psychological mastery of the situation by making it clear he
shares the blacks' contempt for Sue's creepy pseudo-urban date: "They're not your
'bro', and I don't blame them!"
The politics of racial insult become even more complex when Walt takes Thao on a
visit to his local barber in order to give him a masterclass in the friendly
exchange of insults traditionally performed by this "polack" and "wop". When Thao
tries it, the barber is furious and from nowhere produces a pump-action shotgun.
The lesson is clear. Knockabout ethnic comedy is OK when it is performed by your
white elders and betters.

Like its hero, this movie is a great big sentimental softie under its tough-guy
persona. Still very conservative, though. The progressive revelation of this fact
in a number of jolting plot transitions is a little tough to take. Finally, Walt
makes a confession to this baby-faced priest and lovably admits to once kissing a
lady who wasn't his wife and not paying his taxes: no mention of threatening people
with guns and pistol-whipping a gangster, though. There is also the question of how
Walt finally puts away his nasty attitudes to minorities and becomes a better
person: I'm not sure I entirely buy this, and the transformation is questionable.

This is still an enjoyably big, brash, macho melodrama, saved from absurdity by
Eastwood's cracking performance. It isn't his late masterpiece: I think his Iwo
Jima movies fit that bill better. But it is almost certainly Clint Eastwood's final
acting appearance: a must-see on that account if nothing else.