SSS Goes Cruisin' in a Gran Torino
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 12:10 am
We saw Gran Torino today and really enjoyed it. It's a solid performance by Eastwood and a typical great directing job from him. Apparently, all the Vietnamese actors in the film had never appeared in a film before (they put in an open casting call in the Detroit area), but you wouldn't know it from the polished performances. I've often felt that if I had a good script, I could point a camera at actors like Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman or Gene Hackman and get solid performances out of them. The trick is to get good work from relatively inexperienced people in key roles, and, just as in his last several films, Eastwood has done that.
I also think the script, as well as Eastwood's character, is more subtle than it appears at first glance. He is a bitter, lonely guy who spouts out tons of racial epithets, but it's not out of a sense of hatred; it's a way of keeping people from getting too close to him (his own family is a collection of greedy snobs with kids who show up at their grandmother's funeral with bare midriffs, tee shirts and baseball caps). His character could easily be Dirty Harry thirty years later, with one big difference; he's carrying around a lot of guilt about things that happened in the Korean War.
Eastwood movies take their time moving from one scene to the next, and there's no hurry in this one to get to the big climax. This may be his last film as an actor (he's already working on his next directing project featuring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela), but, if so, he's chosen the perfect vehicle to go out on.
I also think the script, as well as Eastwood's character, is more subtle than it appears at first glance. He is a bitter, lonely guy who spouts out tons of racial epithets, but it's not out of a sense of hatred; it's a way of keeping people from getting too close to him (his own family is a collection of greedy snobs with kids who show up at their grandmother's funeral with bare midriffs, tee shirts and baseball caps). His character could easily be Dirty Harry thirty years later, with one big difference; he's carrying around a lot of guilt about things that happened in the Korean War.
Eastwood movies take their time moving from one scene to the next, and there's no hurry in this one to get to the big climax. This may be his last film as an actor (he's already working on his next directing project featuring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela), but, if so, he's chosen the perfect vehicle to go out on.