Gran Torino.

"Like many characters Clint Eastwood has played in his six-decade screen career," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice, "Walt Kowalski is a man outside of his own time - a man who senses on some deep, inarticulable level that he has outlived his own usefulness. He's a little bit of 'Dirty' Harry Callahan, brandishing his disgust (and his firearm) at the unsightly blemishes of a value-less society; a little bit of Million Dollar Baby's Frankie Dunn, the rundown boxing trainer who's been as much of a disappointment to himself as to his estranged family; and more than a little bit of Unforgiven's Bill Munny, the has-been gunslinger haunted by the sins of his past but unable to refuse one last ride in the saddle. And much like those movies, Gran Torino (which Eastwood directed from a generally superb script by newcomer Nick Schenk) is about what happens when circumstance hurls Walt Kowalski into direct conflict with the present.... Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell."

Updated through 12/14.

"Eastwood's portrayal of Walt echoes a career capper of his predecessor John Wayne," writes Bill Weber in Slant, "but rather than the self-parodying True Grit it's the similarly mournful The Shootist (directed by Clint mentor Don Siegel). If Gran Torino's climactic showdown is the erstwhile Dirty Harry's last as a leading man, conducted with a strategy at the polar opposite from the Man with No Name's, it's a final lament that the way of the gun is a guarantor of self-destructive pain."

"In short, Eastwood applies some interesting formalist strategies (he uses light to perpetually convey the feeling that his character has absolutely nowhere to go but up) to material that's pitched at the broad level of an 80s culture-clash comedy, and if the result isn't a masterpiece, the artistic friction on display here is delirious to behold," blogs Ed Gonzalez.

"There are apparently few greater pleasures than watching Clint Eastwood as a get-off-my-lawn Detroit retiree growl dated racial slurs to one and all in his sunny suburb," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Walt is also evidently a Dirty Harry fan (Eastwood even allows his defiance to seem slightly loony), introducing a shifting of gears recalling his superior A Perfect World."

"Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino... caps his career as both a director and an actor with his portrayal of a heroically redeemed bigot of such humanity and luminosity as to exhaust my supply of superlatives," begins Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Update: Via Craig Phillips, the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein talks with Schenk, who'd never written a feature film before:

Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy's in northeast Minneapolis. It was a good release for Schenk, who was holding down a series of day jobs, driving a fruit truck and doing construction work. "I just scribbled away every night," he told me. "The bartender there is a friend, so sometimes I'd ask him questions about where I was going with the story as I was writing. When it came, the words just came. One night, I knocked off 25 pages right there in the bar."

Updates, 12/11: "Mr Eastwood bought the script in February, then shot the movie over the summer at a guerrilla filmmaker's pace, finishing in 32 days. The fast clip, Mr Eastwood said, helped him with the Hmong members of the cast, most of whom had never acted and many of whom didn't speak English. 'I'd give them little pointers along the way, Acting 101,' he said. 'And I move along at a rate that doesn't give them too much of a chance to think.'" Bruce Headlam meets Eastwood for the New York Times.

"To insist that Eastwood's trite, B-movie storytelling is classical requires an excessive regard for junk," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 12/13: "Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it's done," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "This year's model is Gran Torino, a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the USA, in that industrial graveyard called Detroit. I'm not sure how he does it, but I don't want him to stop. Not because every film is great - though, damn, many are - but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life."

"[I]f the film is a standard-issue redemption saga, it's also one of significant, deceptive weight, in large part because its preoccupation with the burden and self-destructive ramifications of violence is given acute resonance by Eastwood's presence," writes Nick Schager in Cinematical. "Despite a lower-middle-class urban setting and his cranky geriatric self positioned front and center-frame, Eastwood explicitly casts Gran Torino as a Western (or, rather, neo-Western), and not simply because it includes a few weapons-drawn standoffs and vicious cross-cultural tensions. Gunslinger Walt may live next door to Thao and his plucky sister Sue (Ahney Hur), but he's the strange outsider who figuratively waltzes into town and rights the wrongs of an aggrieved, fatherless clan, who in turn embrace him as their paternal guardian."

"[U]ntil Gran Torino starts rumbling headlong toward its tone-deaf, self-serious ending... it's often enjoyable, satisfying and funny," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "'I have more in common with these gooks than I do with my own family,' Walt says in the movie's most telling line, although he doesn't have to spell it out, given that his own kids and grandkids clearly believe that, just because they're white Americans, everything should be handed to them. Gran Torino, whatever its flaws are, is a movie about what America looks like now, and it posits that the work of living amicably together is sometimes hard but always worth it."

"Walt Kowalski, a just-widowed Korean War vet with a grudge against his Hmong neighbors, is Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona," writes Slate's Dana Stevens.

"The movie is ludicrous, but Eastwood's consistency is poignant," writes New York's David Edelstein. "He has an agenda and sticks to it."

"As topical and urgent as anything he has ever made, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, a film that serves as both an elegy for the past and a reckoning for the future from an American movie icon who is only a couple of years from octogenarian status, is some kind of American masterpiece," writes Brandon Harris.

"Eastwood plays a man from another era, and the film around him often feels similarly out of time," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "For what's reputed to be his final acting role, Eastwood has crafted an old-fashioned melodrama, but one in service to a story about changing times, which makes it a far more interesting film than the sum of its squints and snarls."

"Where is Sam Fuller when we need him most?" asks Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "The problem, a somewhat depressing one, is that Eastwood has grown into a director who thinks he's superior to his mentors."

"Gran Torino is, in tone and style, about as far from its predecessor as you can get," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "it's arguably a better film than Changeling; certainly it's a film with more obvious pleasures."

"The notion of a 78-year-old action hero may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Eastwood brings it off, even if his toughness is as much verbal as physical," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Even at 78, Eastwood can make 'Get off my lawn' sound as menacing as 'Make my day,' and when he says 'I blow a hole in your face and sleep like a baby,' he sounds as if he means it."

Update, 12/14: "I hope Eastwood at least gets a nomination for the song he sings over the closing credits, if only so that he can perform it during the telecast," writes Paul Matwychuk. "Actually, Eastwood should sing all the nominated songs - that may be the only way I could make it through that Miley Cyrus song from Bolt."

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2008 12:51 AM