Summary
Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film Gran Torino opens with a funeral scene in a Michigan church. An organ plays as the shot pans over a photo of Walt Kowalski’s wife, Dorothy, and her casket, covered in a white sheet. Mourners shake Walt’s hand and take seats in pews. Walt scowls at the sight of his granddaughter Ashley’s exposed belly-button piercing. Walt’s children gossip about how there’s nothing anyone can do to avoid disappointing their father. They discuss whether he’ll get into trouble living alone in the old neighborhood. The Catholic priest speaks of the bitter pain death causes. Walt listens while scowling. The priest is very young and baby-faced. Walt’s granddaughter texts. Walt swears to himself as he listens to the priest talk about turning to the Lord.
At the reception in Walt’s house, Walt goes to the basement to get chairs. He stumbles upon his grandsons looking through a chest of his Korean war memorabilia from the time he served. The boys pretend they weren’t looking. Upstairs, Walt leaves the party to have a pinch of chewing tobacco and take his old dog for a walk. Next door, new neighbors are moving in. They are Hmong people. Walt says to himself, “How many swamp rats can you get in one room?” There is an American flag on his porch.
In the garage he finds Ashley smoking a cigarette. She asks him about his vintage car. He says he got it in 1972. She asks what he will do with it when he dies. He scowls at her. She asks about his “retro” couch as well, saying she’d like it for when she starts college. He spits on the ground. The next-door neighbor, Thao, a young Hmong man, asks to borrow jumper cables. Walt tells him to show some respect because they’re mourning and sends him away with nothing. The young priest calls Walt by his first name; Walt corrects him. The priest says he promised Dorothy that he’d watch over Walt. Dorothy had said she wanted Walt to go to confession. Walt “confesses” that he has no desire to confess to “a boy just out of the seminary.”
The mourners leave as Walt attaches jumper cables. In the car, Walt’s son discusses with his children how Walt’s behavior was irritating. The scene cuts back to Walt as he watches his new neighbors cut the head off a live chicken in the backyard. He mutters that they’re barbarians. The house is full next door as the neighbors bless the new property.
Another day, Walt notices the neighbors’ lawn is drying out. He mutters that the previous owner would turn in his grave if he saw. He asks himself, “Why’d the chinks have to move in here?” A grandmother steps onto her porch and says something hostile in Hmong to Walt. Walt spits brown tobacco spit. She leans over the porch and spits a greater amount of brown fluid, presumably from chewing betel nuts.
The priest arrives on Walt’s porch and says he’d like to talk. He asks what Walt’s problem is with him. Walt says, “Well I think you’re an over-educated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of old ladies and promise them eternity.” Walt slams the door on the priest’s face.
Thao, the young man from next door, is walking while reading in the neighborhood when a car full of Latino gangsters shouts and teases him. The boy’s cousin (“Spider,” actual name Fong) drives up in a car to defend him. He and his Hmong gangster friends shout and wave a gun until the Latinos leave. They then demand that Thao get in the car because they just bailed him out. He ignores them and keeps walking, upsetting the scary-looking men.
The Hmong gangsters arrive at the house the next day. The boy’s sister, Sue, gives the gangsters attitude as they try to intimidate the boy into joining the gang. He is silent as they insist he “roll with them.” Eventually, he asks what he has to do. They go next door and discuss Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino.
The scene cuts to Walt drinking beer at a veteran’s bar with two friends. He tells a racist joke as the priest walks up behind him. All the men know “Father Gerald.” He says he is there to talk to Walt. Walt goes to a booth with the priest, who repeats his promise to get Walt to go to confession. The priest suggests they talk about life and death. Walt says the priest knows only what he learned in priest school. Walt says he learned a lot about death during three years in Korea, where he killed many men, doing horrible things he’ll live with until the day he dies. The priest asks what he knows about living. Walt can only say he survived, married, and had children. “Sounds like you know a lot more about death than you do about living,” the priest says. Walt takes a shot and agrees that may be so.
That night Walt wakes to the sound of someone breaking into his garage. He swears to himself and gets a shotgun out of a chest; he loads it and goes to the garage. He points the gun at the neighbor boy, Thao, but doesn’t shoot. Walt then trips, and Thao runs away. His cousin is waiting with his friends in their car. They tell Thao to get in.
Analysis
The opening scenes of Gran Torino establish the characteristics and milieu of Walt, the film’s protagonist. An elderly Korean War veteran, Walt wears a scowl for the duration of his wife’s funeral, judging the disrespectful appearances and behavior of his grandchildren. Unbeknownst to Walt, his adult children discuss him in disparaging terms, speaking of how he can’t be pleased. As the priest speaks of the need to turn to the Lord in times of grief, Walt swears to himself, his alienation from the world around him on full display.
During the wake at Walt’s house in Highland Park, a Detroit metro neighborhood that was once mostly populated by white working-class residents, Walt grimaces as the Vang Lors, a Hmong-American family, move in next door to him. Walt’s reaction is to mutter a racist comment to himself, making it clear to the audience that he has no fondness for the changing demographics of his neighborhood. By establishing this setting, Eastwood subtly introduces the themes of Hmong-American culture and of deindustrialization, as it is the changing economic and demographic make-up of Detroit that leads Walt to live next door to people from a culture he does not care to understand.
Eastwood introduces the themes of self-reliance and masculinity during Walt’s conversation with the youthful priest, Father Janovich. The priest had promised Dorothy that he would get Walt to go to confession, a convention in Catholicism in which a parishioner goes into a confession box and speaks to a priest through a mesh privacy screen. After the person confesses to their sins and seeks repentance, the priest absolves them of their sins. However, Walt’s investment in masculinity comes with an entrenched repression and insistence upon trusting only himself. Rather than accept the priest’s offer of support in his grief, Walt insults the man with a belittling comment, showing him that he will not be condescended to by a novice priest.
In subsequent scenes, Walt continues to react to the Vang Lors with racist hostility. In a moment of comic irony, the grandmother of the family spits a greater volume of brown spit (from betel nut chewing) onto her lawn after Walt spits chewing tobacco in her direction. A new conflict enters the story when the camera moves away from Walt to Thao as he is being harassed by a Latino gang on the way home from school. In this scene, Eastwood displays another type of masculine posturing. As with Walt, the male gang members are acting tough and threatening out of insecurity. They pick on a lone kid, an easy target when they are in a car full of backup.
While Spider comes to Thao’s defense, it is clear from Thao’s reluctance to engage with his cousin that there is a history of Spider and his gang harassing Thao. The gang’s toxically masculine intimidation continues with Thao finally giving in to their insistence he join them. As an initiation, they ask him to steal Walt’s Gran Torino, a 1972 Ford muscle car Walt proudly keeps in mint condition.
Meanwhile Walt is at a veterans’ bar with a few companions. As he tells an offensive joke, it is a rare moment in which Walt seems to be enjoying himself. The priest sits down with Walt and manages to extract a rare admission: that Walt, because of his trauma from the Korean War, knows more about death than he does about living. Briefly letting down his masculine guard against any vulnerability, Walt concedes that the priest may be right. The partial confession suggests that Walt may not be as hardened in his ways as he would like to make others believe. However, Walt’s insistence on self-reliance arises later that night when, rather than contact police, he picks up his gun to confront Thao as he breaks into Walt’s garage. The act of pointing his gun at a young Asian man appears to disorient Walt, likely because it evokes painful memories of killing people in Korea. Rather than pull the trigger, Walt trips, allowing Thao to escape.
