Remembering My Last Ride on Gran Torino

It would be nice to say that the 2008 movie Gran Torino was the last good Clint Eastwood movie that I remember seeing but as much as I would like to say so, I don't feel comfortable actually saying that. Let's just say I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would...

Anyway, wasn't this movie just a race swap re-make of The Karate Kid?

Yes, in a way, it was. It also seems like a reversal of all those old 1960s and 1970s stories in which the young Caucasian guy (or girl, in the case of the '60s comic book version of Wonder Woman) learned all about self-defense from an elderly Asian man. (Call it the Remo Williams syndrome, if you prefer.)

One of the movie's main subplots had an elderly man (played, of course, by Clint Eastwood) teaching a young Asian boy the fundamentals of American manhood. Eventually the movie had Clint's character trying to protect the young boy's family from a local gang of Asian youths, eventually leading to an unexpected gesture on Clint's character's part that seemed more like a triumph of hope over experience than anything else.

That said, it was not surprising that this movie was more popular with conservative-leaning people like my mother - -who is incidentally a Polish-American who grew up in the type of blue-collar neighborhood that this movie was set in -- than with the more liberal people who have written about this movie online. The movie was a bit on the simplistic side and it was tempting to see this flick as the conservative answer to Crash. (After all, Crash -- save for a few scenes -- tended to take the same shamelessly obvious approach to its issues as well.)

I'm not going to pretend that I liked this movie as much as Unforgiven or The Outlaw Josey Wales -- indeed, I would be very surprised if I still remember this movie a decade from now.

Plus there were quite a few scenes in the movie that I didn't really care for. (For example, it wasn't enough that one character got attacked and beat up, she also had to get raped? Granted, gang members aren't known for their chivalry but still...) Nor does it help that this same plot would have seemed a bit more daring forty or fifty years ago. (Indeed, it makes a sad comment on American society that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is still a market for movies about how violent things can get when "outsiders" move into the neighborhood.)

And yet I was surprised enough by certain plot turns that I found it hard to hate it as much as other critics did. Add to that the fact that my Polish-American mother had no problems with this movie despite the number of times its script used the word "polack" -- a word she has heard directed at herself in anger more than a few times in her life -- and I must conclude that the movie had something going for it. Even if it wasn't as much as Eastwood intended.