Gran Torino

I Don’t Know What I Really Think of It.

A Review by Cyla Allison, Ph.D.


Eric and I are on our annual summer Netflix binge; we watched Gran Torino a couple of nights ago. I have mixed feelings about the movie.

It is a good movie, no doubt. It is powerful, no doubt. It is quintessential Clint Eastwood with all of his characters wrapped up in Walt Kowalski. Eastwood is, by the way, 78 years old.

Here’s what my friend, Alice said I could quote that she quickly threw off:

Jeff and I saw Gran Torino at the theater and I agree it was a powerful movie. The Eastwood character’s role was one of vigilante/hero learning to look beyond ethnicity to the character of a person then taking matters into his own hands, sacrificing his life for the young man next door, his sister, and family when the law failed to protect them.

That’s a perfectly adequate summary.

My problem is making a hero out of Kowalski. I see things as a psychologist, in this case as a social psychologist—a wing of my profession I generally make faces at as too soft--and as a clinician.. As a clinical psychologist, I could see that Eastwood’s character might or might not hold together as a character in ‘real’ life.

I also have to remember it is only a movie and everything can’t be included, but the problem solving, though satisfying, is more suitable for the old wild west (spaghetti western, anyone?) than a 20th century large city. Is Kowalski limited by his ethnic? Is he another stereotypical dumb Pollack? Is he limited by his own narrowness and lack of imagination? Are his ethics and tough guy stuff simply narcissism?

How else could he have saved the family? Nobody in the movie even tried the police. We are led to assume police are useless, as useless and naive as the boy-virgin- priest we meet at the beginning of the movie. What we see and don’t examine is that Kowalski’s decision to take unilateral action with the gang leads to more violence and especially unspeakable violence to sweet Sue next door who first melted his heart. Nobody considers if the kind of racism he spouted all his life is part of the reason, on a grand scale, the gang developed in the first place. Gangs develop as a club, a family to give identity and power to those who feel powerless; of course it is a dead end solution, but that’s what happens.

The acting of course is superb. We mourn Walt’s death, but know he was dying anyhow and we somehow are to forgive him never getting close to his own sons. (Why? Why do we forgive him and blame them? Did that wonderful wife keep him from it? They must have been cute malleable little boys once.)

And I know that if he had solved the problem some other way—had involved the gang squad of the police, had introduced his selfish granddaughter to Sue in some way that benefitted both, had both families sell their homes and move to a better neighborhood together, had donated his tools and a college education from his estate to Thao, that we would have had a virtuous, do-gooder and boring movie. I get that. But the movie speaks to our most foolish fantasies: carrying a big gun, standing down a bunch of teen thugs, cleaning up the neighborhood and exacting perfect revenge. We don’t really stop to think that it didn’t work very well, at all.

At first I was moved by Walt’s crafty final sacrifice. Then I began to think about how the problem was solved for Walt but not really for much of anyone else. The boy next door did fine, as he got the car, came of age and all that. The girl Sue was forever raped and damaged goods and will never recover. His sons remain alienated and his granddaughter self-absorbed. He died feeling virtuous. I should be cheering, but I feel oddly robbed. It was all about him.