Clint Eastwood
Gran Torino

Let’s try to dream. Is cinema not perhaps the art of dreams?

Let’s imagine that the Kowalski from "Vanishing Point" (Vanishing Point, 1971) who launched himself with his Dodge Challenger against the bulldozers at the police roadblock, which was trying to stop his escape from society and his affirmation of individual freedom, did not die. That he was saved from the flames and after a brief stay in the hospital was imprisoned for a few years; after all, he had not killed anyone. We know that that Kowalski, the dirty war veteran, had smiled and deliberately met his end because his existential escape had become impossible. Once that physical escape also failed, he had no choice but to adapt to the rules of the established society: a job in a Ford factory, a two-story house in the suburbs, a wife, and children.

 This Kowalski (Gran Torino, 2008) is now an old man in retirement and has a face carved in stone, that of Clint Eastwood. He has just lost his wife, lives alone in that house, and for the now-married children, he is a problem. He still speaks little as he did almost forty years ago, and in all this time the stereotyped life has transformed him, as often happens, from a rebel to a conservative. He hates everything about modernity, the young priests who preach without knowing anything about life and death, the rude and opportunistic children and grandchildren, the yellow faces that infest the neighborhood. He loves his 1972 Ford Gran Torino because perhaps it reminds him of the Dodge destroyed in the crash, the crazy horse that was supposed to lead him to freedom. Now, the freedom granted to him by the false and hypocritical American society consists of his house and the piece of garden around it. He is a loner who asserts his dignity as a "free man" in isolation.

Or is it the fear of feeling involved? Of truly sharing with someone who deserves it? This someone will be young Taho, the maladjusted Asian neighbor victimized along with his family by the bullying of his own countrymen, a gang of thugs. To free oneself from the fear of falling, one must truly fall, and what he didn’t achieve forty years ago with the Dodge speeding madly against the barrier, he will achieve now calmly using a weapon that doesn’t exist: two fingers pointed like a gun at the new obstacle.

 Now Kowalski is finally free.