Gran Torino
Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Nick Schenk and based on a story by Nick Schenk and Dave Johannson. With Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, John Carroll Lynch, and Doua Moua. (R)
Clint Eastwood, director and star of Gran Torino, has stated that the film will mark his final performance in front of the cameras. If true, he will be missed. It's hard to imagine another actor working today whose visage has become so linked to our very concept of American cinema. Eastwood's face—sun-dried, creased and cracked, worn-in as a kid's baseball mitt—has come to stand for a vanishing Hollywood where a simple story well told was enough. Without Eastwood, our movies will lose a bit of their steeliness.
But if Gran Torino is his swan song as an actor—he's already busy behind the camera on a Nelson Mandela biopic—he's chosen a plum role to go out on. In embittered Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, Eastwood finds a part so tailor-made for him that it may be the one that finally replaces his work in Dirty Harry as most people's point of reference.
Kowalski, retired after a lifetime at a Michigan Ford factory, is a flinty, self-reliant old man disgusted with a world that's changing around him. He's disgusted with his self-absorbed sons and their imported SUVs; he's disgusted with his grandkids, who arrive at his wife's funeral in football jerseys and belly rings; he's disgusted with the wet-behind-the-ears priest—an "over-educated 27-year-old virgin"—who insists on trying to comfort him.
Mostly, he's disgusted that his down-at-heel neighborhood has become home to a mostly minority population, including a large enclave of Hmong. Kowalski's casual bigotry is so ingrained that his long list of slurs—the script is an OED of insults—continue to pepper his speech even after his new neighbors inform him that the Hmong fought alongside the U.S. during the war in Vietnam. Determined to ignore them, Walt spends his days drinking beer on the porch or polishing the vintage Gran Torino that sits in his driveway.
He's forced to engage them when he discovers the teenaged Thao trying to steal his car as part of a gang initiation. When he drives the gang away at gunpoint—because they're on his lawn—he becomes a neighborhood hero, deluged with tokens of gratitude from the Hmong. As he begins to thaw, Kowalski comes to realize that he has far more in common with his hard-working immigrant neighbors than he does with his own family. It turns out he even likes their barbecue.
Eastwood plays that change smartly; it would be very easy for the film to tip into a banal sentimentality, but even as his Walt softens, he never loses the cantankerous center that makes him believable. Which is not to say that Gran Torino is a "realistic" picture any more than Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns were, but like those films, the joy in this one comes from reveling in the actor's performance. Eastwood takes a barebones character and makes something memorable and affecting with little more than a curled lip and a squint.
With only 200,000 Hmong in the U.S., it's perhaps not surprising that the roles of Thao and his sister Sue are filled by non-professionals, but it is unfortunate, as it leads to some painfully stiff emoting as Walt becomes a father figure to the drifting Thao. Because of that, it's unlikely that Gran Torino will be remembered as a great movie, but Eastwood's performance alone makes it worth seeing, and that, at least, will last.
*
Defiance
Directed by Edward Zwick. Written by Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick, based on the book by Nechama Tec. With Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, and Alexa Davalos. (R)
In a year that's already seen a slew of films dealing with the Holocaust, Defiance stands out due to its astonishing true history. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, four brothers escaped the bloody campaign of the Germans by taking to the forests around their home. They were not alone; as others sought refuge in the wood, the refugees banded together, eventually numbering over a thousand. They would live in the forests for over two years.
The eldest brother and leader of this band was Tuvia Bielski, played here with a rough tenderness by Daniel Craig. Compassionate to a fault, he refused to turn anyone away, even when the harsh Polish winter was looming and supplies began to run thin. "We'll water the soup," he says, looking at the few pounds of potatoes left to feed the horde. While Tuvia was focused on saving his fellow Jews, his brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) took a more active tack, joining with nearby Soviet partisans to fight the Nazis.
To keep order in his improvised village, Tuvia becomes a benign dictator, forcing everyone to work both within the forest and on the dangerous "food missions" that expose people to capture or death as they slip into towns for rations. Pregnancies and dissent are forbidden. On arriving at the camp, new members surrender their valuables and find their place in the camp routine—a watchmaker, for instance, might find new life as a gunsmith servicing the camp's growing weapons cache.
A strange but welcome thing about Defiance is how little those weapons are used. They are used, of course—it's a war—but the bulk of the film is more concerned with the why and how of forest life. Bielski's group came to build their own hospital and tannery, had their own court of law, and constructed huts out of the trees that surrounded them; Defiance gets most of its dramatic mileage from the internal workings of the camp. Most World War II movies feature an overload of jackboots and swastikas, but here the Nazis don't get much screen time. Instead they hover outside the woods, an unseen menace less pressing than the dropping temperatures.
But while camp life is the heart of the film, its meatiest role isn't that of Tuvia but of his brother Zus. Determined to fight, he aligns himself with the anti-Semitic Soviets on the theory that killing Germans will save more Jews than will hiding in the forest. Where Tuvia seems strong and centered from the first frame, Zus is struggling with his choices, which makes for better drama. Craig is better than usual as Tuvia, but Schreiber is several notches above him, something brought home in their scenes together.
The Bielski Partisans were largely forgotten before the release of the book by Nechama Tec on which Defiance is based. Tuvia and Zus emigrated to New York after the war, living quiet lives as owners of a small trucking firm. The epilogue to the film notes that there are over 10,000 people, descendants of Bielski's group of resisters, who owe their lives to the brothers. That is a legacy worth celebrating.
Also this week: In the age of the mp3, when even the most obscure music is only a few clicks away, the idea of a record store can seem like a quaint anachronism, akin to getting a shave from your barber. But it wasn't that long ago that local record stores served as de facto community centers, places where musicians and music lovers would linger while they looked through the latest releases. For some people, that never changed—a relative of mine has a record collection so large it requires not only its own room, but structural reinforcement of the floor to support the weight of so much vinyl—but for many, it's a thing of the past.
Easthampton resident Brendan Toller's new documentary I Need That Record! aims to challenge that assumption. Featuring interviews with everyone from Sonic Youth frontman and local record label honcho Thurston Moore to the author and activist Noam Chomsky, Toller's film aims to tell "the story of our connection to independent record stores and the importance of independent thought and culture," and what will happen as the marketplace for music becomes more homogenized.
Much of the groundwork for I Need That Record! was laid on a cross-country tour Toller made, where he stopped in at local record shops with names like Grimey's and Electric Fetus. Appropriately, his film will screen at Mystery Train Records in Amherst, instead of the theater around the corner, on Friday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. with short works by Ted Lee and Zach Ianazzi.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
