That would encompass then the Hmong. These little-known south-east Asian people are among the foreign faces who have transformed Clint Eastwood's Detroit neighbourhood in Gran Torino, the first film which he has both directed and starred in since taking home the Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby five years ago, and which has been much praised in the US. Eastwood plays Walt, a retired car worker and Korean war veteran, an irascible old rooster who keeps his lawn clipped and his nose clean and who sees around him a rising tide of decay, violence and alien voices. His pride and joy is the immaculately maintained 1972 car of the title, which sits gleaming in his garage until one day, one of his new neighbours, the young, shy Thao tries to steal it.
I wonder how good you are at guessing what comes next. Do you think perhaps that after this bungled attempt, Walt and Thao start to build some sort of relationship, grudging and hostile at first, but which gradually warms? That, as a result, they both learn something about themselves? Especially Walt?
You're dead right, of course, but your assumptions would have been made easier by all sorts of tricks along the way. The almost comical sound of Walt growling through gritted teeth, as he suffers the falling standards all around him, is added to the soundtrack. He's an unapproachable control-freak, feared and disliked by his own family, who are also pretty useless. His seems to be the only house in the street flying the stars and stripes. His hostility to his neighbours is so unyielding that any inroads they manage to make could only be positive. Underlying all of this is the popularity of Eastwood's star persona - Mount Rushmore shot through with a wide streak of Cool - which ensures that the racial slurs his character spits out could only ever be skin deep. We are on his side from the start, but only because we assume that Clint's too big a man to actually mean the insults to hurt. We can actually laugh along with him.


















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