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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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Leon Haller
September 14th, 2009
3:09 PM
Very good review, upon casual reading; less so in mulling it a bit. In typically British (literate, understated) fashion (well, British of the old-school), you have elucidated why this film was so much more disappointing than it promised to be. Still, there are several flaws in your reasoning, and lacunae in your interpretation. First, if universality were uppermost in a filmmaker's (or at least producer's) mind, why tackle an inherently 'divisive' subject like immigration at all? There will always be endless variations on the old staples: romance, alien invaders (I mean the kind from other planets), parent/child conflict, rogue government agencies, deranged ax-wielders, etc. Second, no producer worth a week's salary would idiotically assume that the audience for a film starring 78 year old Clint Eastwood would primarily consist of teenage Hispanics, or non-whites generally (or even white teens). Today, Clint's audiences consist overwhelmingly of those of us middle-aged white men who were teens or younger during his glory days (in the 1960s-1980s), when his movies could hardly be called "politically orthodox" (I believe that is synonymous with "politically correct", which means something like "culturally New Leftist"), at least by then or now current Hollywood or global cinema standards. What is far more interesting, at least in considering this film, is the possibility that Clint himself sincerely adheres to the naively (and slightly old-fashioned) liberal 'assimilationist' nonsense, whereby all the peoples of the world are really just the same, if only we would all (in practice, the native-born; in reality, only the native-born whites of historically white nations) make the effort to 'get to know' each other, and hence basically demographically interchangeable, apart from some charmingly 'diverse' (and mostly 'enriching' - to the natives, that is) cultural eccentricities, which of course, must be treated With the Utmost Respect. Why would Dirty Harry make such piffle? Why do whites throughout the Western world continue to lack the courage even to admit to themselves, let alone to state publicly, that the Third World immigration invasion of our ancient fatherlands has constituted at once the greatest threat to our collective civilisational survival that we have ever faced, as well as, on the part of our 'leaders', the greatest series of acts of treason that mankind has ever witnessed? Yes, it would be nice to see a film EVER express the point of view or endorse the interests of a white majority somewhere in conflict with some kind of non-whites. To ask why such an obviously themed film is NEVER made is immediately to bump up against much more profound questions of, as intimated, a world-historical nature: why are whites the only race concerned about their own racism (which means in practice that we are the only race that is NOT overwhelmingly ethnocentric, or racist)? How has a race once proudly supremacist become pathetically unwilling even to defend its own culture? How has a formerly imperial race become unable even to discuss the obvious - that we are now the victims of 'reverse colonialism', that immigration = imperialism? What is wrong with us, how has this suicidal mentality captured a large swath of the thinking public (especially the thinking public), what is the morally legitimate response of an ordinary patriot, when does violent resistance to state-imposed 'diversification' become not only morally permissible, but mandatory, etc.? These are the real questions this ridiculous and mendacious film raises. Finally, on the subject of mendacity, the reviewer ought to have said something more about the structure of the film, and its narratively duplicitous conclusion. Watch the trailer, as I did several times prior to other films. Clearly the editor tried to instill in the audience a sense of suspense and incipient action (there were many scenes of guns, guns being fired, assorted violence, etc.) The intent was to trade on Clint's historic action-persona. More egregiously than the trailer, the movie itself is structured in a classic suspense manner, a series of worsening incidents and tensions, with appropriately portentous music, creating an expectation of a cathartic action finale. To call what finally occurs a "cop-out" is an understatement. Morally, politically, culturally, racially, and even cinematically, this film is a sell-out. Goodbye, Clint, and good riddance! At least we'll always have Harry Callaghan, and the Man with No Name.

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