JOHANNESBURG, South Africa / The Times / Magazine / August 8, 2009
Clint Eastwood is excellent in a role only he does best — a racist, miserable yet likeable old coot.
By Neil Sonnekus
Gran Torino * * ** Stars: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her Director: Clint Eastwood Eastwood is about the only actor who can still get away with being unPC and make old age sexy and, more importantly, relevant. We know that his Walt Kowalski doesn’t really mean it when he calls his new Korean neighbours gooks and fish heads, but that snarling prejudice has a more serious, even karmic undertow in that he fought their ancestors — in their own country — back in the ’50s. Now their descendants live next door. And he is clearly haunted by things that happened way back then.
Gran Torino's Clint Eastwood. Photo: Jason Kempin / Getty Images But after he’s saved the neighbour’s daughter, Sue (Her), from a gang rape in that old Eastwoodian way — you want to argue with my pistol? — he’s snowed under with gifts from gabbling Korean ladies and invited to a party next door. He might be the tallest person at the party, but one of the shortest, a shaman, tells him that he still has a lot of unresolved stuff to deal with. Snarl, snarl, mutter, mutter. There he sits on the porch of his little house with its US flag, drinking beer, smoking, the wife dead, surrounded by immigrants, his Ford Gran Torino polished to perfection. He used to be a Ford worker, assembled steering columns for the Torinos, just a good working-class man who was prepared to die for his country. Now he’s surrounded by the MTV generation. He talks to himself, though not so convincingly. It’s one of the few times an actor can speak to himself. He’s either mad or old, or both. But what about his family? Pure WASPs. He can’t stomach his sons nor their wives and children, who seem to think it’s cool to send SMSes at grandma’s funeral . Worse, his one son and daughter-in-law actually try to foist an old age home on to him. Very bad idea. So it’s not too far-fetched to come to the realisation that he has more in common with these foreigners than his own family. Talking of whom, there is that baby-faced priest, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), who will insist on trying to save Kowalski’s soul. When he does finally confess, it’s about kissing another woman while his wife was still alive! Talk about a generation gap. But what is one to make of all this? That Kowalski represents a dying breed that will be replaced by gangsters, whether Korean or African-American? Not on your life. The septuagenarian is saying that the old US values of service and immigrant integration are still the world’s only salvation, and that the new so-called values whereby the likes of Justin Timberlake endorse McDonald’s frankly suck. P Special features include… Gran Torino: More than a car. Or as Eastwood would have it: “It’s as antique as he is,” followed by a dry little laugh. Doubt * * Stars: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman Director: John Patrick Shanley The Catholic Church has been in the news for the wrong reason lately, that reason being the fairly widespread abuse by its priests of their usually underage flock. Therefore, one would expect this kind of film to deal with that issue directly, but it doesn’t. Instead it is set in another era, 1964, and seems more concerned with the titular issue of doubt — and then it is the doubt of proof more than the doubt of faith. 
A nasty nun, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep), hears a petty rumour from a rather naive nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), and thus initiates her campaign of bile against the object of her hatred, Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman). But is Sister Aloysius just plain nasty, or is she fighting a male-dominated religion? The latter is clearly alluded to, but if she represents the battle against that domination, then one could infer that the playwright and director, Shanley, is clearly opposed to it. For Aloysius is a sneering, domineering, objectionable creature who is almost too bad to believe, the kind of cold, callous bitch whose face would be as tight as her mean little heart. Yet Streep plays her quite histrionically, her face constantly mobile, as if battling with demons neither her words nor actions support. In contrast, Adams’s Sister James is almost too good to be true. With a face, tone and demeanour that belongs to the Middle Ages, if not pure fantasy, she makes one tiny indiscretion, but otherwise she must be an angel. Where does she come from, why did she become a nun when others were turning on, tuning in and dropping out? We are never told. And then there is Hoffman, who seems as born to this role as many of his others. With a smile or a shrug he can somehow convey years of experience as a priest. The fact that he wears his nails long could prove anything — and nothing. He makes no bones about it and tells his young wards that the main thing is that he keeps them clean. But is he a paedophile? It’s a story that has local ramifications, but is he the abuser of a child because that child is black or is he a bleeding-hearted liberal who is over-compensating in his concern for that child? Who knows? We certainly don’t. So we’re left with the fact that our priest has gone from one parish to another in the past, that he gets promoted after Aloysius’s campaign, and that suddenly she is beset by doubts. Perhaps that is what her face has been trying to tell us all this time. We have to infer that the only thing that might help her is what Father Flynn (Hoffman) preached about so eloquently, practised so ambiguously, and what Sister James applies so serenely, namely compassion. But it is doubtful whether anyone feels any pity for this monster at this stage, which is perhaps the whole, muddied point. [rc] © 2008 AVUSA, Inc.
