Culture clash

In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood uses his icon status to successfully take on the sensitive subject of racism | Megan Basham

AP/ Photo by Anthony Michael Rivetti (Warner Bros.)

Leave it to Clint Eastwood to make a drama that generates more belly-busting laughs than most recent comedies and more insight into what drives and satisfies the human spirit than the majority of 2008’s indie Oscar-bait put together.

As Gran Torino’s Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, Eastwood offers us a thoroughly unlikable character that manages, even in his unrepentant racism, to win our favor. He pulls this trick off by, first, realistically addressing the culture clashes that are as annoying as they are unavoidable in a melting pot like ours and, second, by depicting the ugly side of middle-class America just as much as he depicts the gang-violence typical of poor immigrant neighborhoods. It’s not pretty, and neither is Walt, but he is made more so in that he doesn’t pull punches no matter what group he’s assaulting, even his own.

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January 17, 2009, Vol. 24, No. 1

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