We don’t have time for a full-blown review for the “Gran Torino,” screenplay, but we will say this, having recently finished it, we’re having some second thoughts/ less dismissive ideas about the film.
Yeah, the trailer looks terrible and even on a second glance (which we just did right now), there’s no improvement, but screenwriter Nick Schenk’s script is rather great and definitely wins you over.
Yes, Clint Eastwood (the character’s name is Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet) is a grumpy old codger in the story, but eventually, he starts to warm to his Hmong neighbors (the Hmong people are actually the little-known Vietnamese that fought with the Americans during the Vietnam war, and then were persecuted and basically driven out of the country once the U.S. left). And when he does so it’s not in the easy, Hollywood nature; his character basically stays a racist throughout, but it actually is quite funny.
His elderly friends are racist to him (he’s Polish) and he’s racist right back; there’s almost an endearing macho camaraderie element to the constant ribbing. What changes in Eastwood’s get-off-my-lawn character is the respect he begins to gain for the people around him. But it’s well executed and well documented. It’s not like his character turns his tune 180 degrees, he still kind of hates them (and everyone he’s a bitter misanthropist), but without giving away too much, he’s a man of his principles and when these people are wronged, he comes to their aid, because it’s the right thing to do; even if they do kind of piss him off constantly.
The gist of the the turning point in the script – what gives the story its motivation – is that Eastwood’s teenage Hmong neighbor, a quiet, peaceful, but inept young boy named Tao, is coerced by local Hmong gang-bangers to steal the old racist’s prized, 1972 Gran Torino muscle car. When this plan fails (at the end of Eastwood’s shotgun) and Tao is caught, his family is shamed. Feeling that Eastwood has saved the young boy, they feel indebted to him and his punishment is to work for free. Eastwood’s character wants no part of it and resists, but his fastidious nature and his immense distaste for the dilapidated look of the neighborhood soon give him an idea: use the boy’s punishment as a way to clean up the the dis-repaired Hmong houses, so he quickly puts his servitude to work elsewhere. The boy is pathetic in this kind of handyman work, and is bullied constantly by the gangbangers, but Eastwood doesn’t take pity on him. Rather he’s sick to his stomach of the boy acting like a shy worm and he urges him on to be a man and soon wants to teach him to grow a pair. It’s the unfairness of the bullying that really spurns him on to teach the boy to stand up for himself on his own to feet and when the boy begins to rise to the challenge ever so slightly, a tentative friendship begins to emerge [ed. wait, isn’t that sort of a review].
Oscar talk has cooled on this one cause it hasn’t screen and yes, the trailer looks like the 101, lowest-common denominator version of a old man who sits on his lawn and throws rocks at kids, but trailers are meant to be reductive. They generally every show shade or nuance (then again, ‘Revolutionary Road’…) and hiding under the hood of Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” trailer might be a movie that could easily purr attractively to Academy voters. Again, it’s all in the execution of course, but on the page, anyhow, “Gran Torino,” is a suprisingly strong script that we enjoyed a lot.
The same can’t be said for example of “Defiance” which we also finished recently. The first 20 pages were convincing, raw and incredibly engaging, but very soon the Ed Zwick clichés and hackneyed story conventions started to raise their ugly heads and we can totally understand why the film was met with very mediocre reviews so far.