Word: walt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Walt Kowalski is, to put it gently, an old crank, given to growling and spitting like a distempered stray. He's a mass of gruff prejudices against the minorities who've moved into his Michigan town. When some kids brawl in front of his house, he brandishes a rifle and actually shouts, "Get off my lawn!" In any other movie, he'd be the sour comic relief or the monster's first victim. But since, in Gran Torino, he's played by Clint Eastwood, Walt is a stalwart man of the Midwest--the hero who has a score to settle...
There are many men, of sullen disposition and modest achievement, who watch a Clint Eastwood movie and wish they could resolve their daily dilemmas with a blast of gunfire and walk away free. Walt Kowalski might be such a one. At his wife's funeral, he can swat away the condolences of relatives and the parish priest, but he can't evict them from his life. Retired after 50 years on the Ford assembly line, Walt is as much an endangered species as the company he worked for. While he carefully maintains his house, white picket fence...
Channeling Henry Fonda's balky geezer in On Golden Pond (though he's robust where Fonda was frail), Walt is clearly destined for interracial rehab; the movie's story is the thawing of this great slab of mean. He warms to Tao, who could use some foster-fathering; to Tao's well-adjusted sister Sue (Ahney Her); and to their whole adorably folkloric clan. But Walt needs more than living among the Hmong. As a family elder tells him, "You're not at peace...
After stewing for years in what might seem like standard working-class racism, Walt has to resolve his soldiering in the Korean War--when, he tells Tao, "I used to stash guys like you five feet high in Korea. Used 'em for sandbags." Still haunted by killings that now weigh on him like war crimes, he must emerge from his white-picket cave of bitterness and find a purpose for his life: to become a guardian angel to Tao and Sue and an angel of death to anyone who'd do these decent kids harm...
...other words, Walt must both be a Man with No Name, a Dirty Harry, and find a cause beyond duty or blood sport to atone for his Korean gunmanship. This fits with Eastwood's rounding out of his familiar character in later films--challenging the audience to accept "Cleent" when he does surprising things. In Million Dollar Baby, killing was an act of mercy. Here, for Walt to put his life on the line, in a kind of suicide mission, is a final act of contrition...