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Rating:
GRAN TORINO
The roads that lead to paradise are different even for a cowboy, an elderly vigilante, who carries the burden of the failures of his great nation. Walt Kowalski is a former soldier, resembling a cowboy with no herd and no purpose, with a gun he can no longer use, worn out by the atrocities of unjust wars, and with a mind and hands scarred by the alienation of an automobile assembly line. Do human beings or things matter more? Definitely things, like his shiny and appealing Ford Gran Torino displayed proudly every day in front of his house. Children are the product of their parents, but also the mirror of a postponed guilt that resurfaces when age forces you to stop and reflect. Others are others and should be kept at a distance, but unfortunately, you find them beside you every day, speaking a different language and looking at you with suspicion. Those neat little houses, where Doris Day with her blonde wig could comfortably live, become arenas of extreme violence, where valueless youth play gangsters, where the daily scenario is not that of a "rebel without a cause," but the foul-smelling one of Tarantino's films, reminiscent of the battlefields in Korea. Then, like in all stories, you discover that you can’t always have the car with tinted windows, you find that others might be better or worse than you, or just like you, and those who seem the most unfortunate have already shifted into the right gear.
This film depicts a society in crisis, gripped by incomprehensible behavior and compressed by the daily demand for superior performance, which has completely lost control of itself and watches as a passive spectator to violence, ruthless in facts and repugnant in intentions. Clint Eastwood holds the scene and single-handedly moves the pawns in a story with an almost predictable plot and surprises, but with delicate details. He is a great director, but he is also an excellent actor, and this film, in the end, is a homage to his mentors, where we can see the Sergio Leone of many westerns, Michael Cimino, Buddy Van Horn, and the young director Eastwood from the '70s.
And that sin of modest self-celebration is forgivable, as well as understandable, when the camera captures his ice-mixed eyes full of disdain, yet at the same time filled with sad and corroded tenderness.
It’s the elegance that moves, like the soundtrack by James Cullum against the backdrop of a road that is life, traversed by cars that cross paths, brush past, overtake, and never touch. Those shiny cars are us.
VOLGOS
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