ICON. Hero. Legend.
Clint.
Few movie stars endure and thrive past the age of 78. Fewer still pass into myth and folklore, their smallest gesture or facial tic enshrined forever in the collective movie memory.
And few American legends continue to make their best pictures beyond that age. Scorsese’s powers seem on the wane at 66. Woody can pull off the odd impressive “comeback", but at 73 he isn’t really Woody any more. John Ford made his last film in 1966, at the age of 72. Spielberg is still a youngster at 62.
With Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood adds another hefty brick to his already awe-inspiring honour wall, and chips away another significant block of stone to reveal yet more of his monumental movie acting and moviemaking achievements.
This is the former Man With No Name’s 29th feature as director and, remarkably, still one of his best.
Funny and moving, politically incorrect, populist and unapologetically unsubtle, clunky at times but hugely effective and affecting.
The 2006 double bill of Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima was an impressive mark in the sand even by his high standards. His epic Changeling, a film that starts out as a short story then stalks up behind you with a hefty novel full of twists and turns and remarkable revelations, deserved more award recognition.
Now, just months later, Gran Torino works on a smaller scale, on the surface at least. It’s a short story that stays a short story. But it’s here to put a smile on the collective moviegoing face, a tear in the eye and a whole heap of talking points on the table.
Eastwood’s more base gestures to the popular audience can be crass and indulgent – he made two movies with an orangutan, remember. But there is no doubt his popularity endures across generations of film fans.
His directing career, often uneven, is now suitably acclaimed and garlanded, after the likes of Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby.
And he also brings some intellectual weight to his pictures, to get us thinking and reflecting. And perhaps, in the case of Gran Torino, hoping and praying.
It seems suitably ironic for today’s wild and cockamamie times, with America blinking and bawling its way into an Obama era still in its infancy, that a 78-year-old ex-cowboy star turned film-maker should be the guy to successfully tackle the issues of race, violence, war at home and abroad, the impact of the economy on the working classes, crime and community, law and order.
Confession and redemption. Life and death.
Eastwood’s performance as widowed Korean War veteran and retired car production worker Walt Kowalski is a reminder of how accomplished and watchable a screen actor he is (and it’s been said this may well be his last major acting role).
Walt “tells it like it is", to everyone from his Asian immigrant neighbours to his late wife’s rookie priest.
Porch prowling, growling and scowling, unbelieving and well-armed, he’s part Victor Meldrew, part Harry Callahan.
And while Eastwood, the actor, holds centre stage, Eastwood the director once again muscularly exercises his control of classic, traditional, economic storytelling.
Flashy it ain’t, but, in its own basic and laconic way, this is pure cinema, pulling the audience in and unrolling the tale one scene, one shot at a time – a film-making style as lean as our hero’s tall, angular frame.
Those square shoulders still look perfect for hanging a poncho on, just as the dangerously slitted eyes and the contemptuous curl of the lip echo Dirty Harry (while his attempt to sing the closing theme song recalls, less fondly, the musical Paint Your Wagon).
Gran Torino, like many of Eastwood’s movies, engages the fist and the boot as well as the heart and the head. He promotes both the lone vigilante and the family unit (no matter how fractured or unlikely a “family” – see Josey Wales). The most powerful handgun in the world, and the hand of friendship.
He represents the past, the present and the future.
Long may he run.