Gran Torino

“Death is often a bittersweet occasion to us Catholics. Bitter in the pain. Sweet in the

salvation”

Is that right? It seems like a very deep thinking, but Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) has a very different point of view. What do we know about death and life?

Walt Kowalski is a widower old man who surveyed to the Korean War and now lives alone with his dog, Daisy. He’s taken care of his Gran Torino a lot of time and now, it’s one of the most important things he’s worried about, more even his family. He has lived in the same neighborhood all his life but now it’s like an Asian community.The day of his wife funeral, a new Asian family moved into the next-door house and his first thinking was “how many swamp rats can get in one room?”.

Then, we start to note the really racist fact of Walt. I think this film show us what is racism, which are the reasons to be racist and why all those facts are false.

Walt hates his neighbors only because they are yellow people, and there are no far reasons.

On the opposite hand, he has reasons not to like his family. They are not good people; they love him because he’s old and have money, a house and a beautiful car. Furthermore, they treat him as a useless old man and want him to go to a retirement community (probably because they want his big house).

Then, he started to realize that his neighbors aren’t bad people even being yellow. It’s not a race matter; it depends always on the person, not on their skin color.

I think the film shows how there are people with an evil heart, and they don’t have the same skin color. It is interesting watching how an old man change his mind (old people normally aren’t’ open-minded).

Once I saw a documentary about racism that is highly recommended. After Luther King died, a teacher taught her racist students what was the racism in practice. Those children were racist because they were educated like that, but they didn’t really know why they hate black people. The teacher divided the class between blue-eyes children, and brown-eyes children. It’s amazing how children realized the feeling of being discriminated. The documentary called “A class divided” shows how those children came back to their school 14 years before and saw their “experiment”. Very useful, I think.

I didn’t want to be very heavy with this essay, but the film has lots of contents. I think the main topic is racism (that have some funny scenes, for instance, the oldest woman living in the next-door Walt’s house hates Walt because he’s white, and they two stay in the porch saying bad things about the other, and they don’t understand each other because of the language), but it also tells us the story of a young Hmong boy whose cousins want him to become a criminal and he fights versus a very strong tradition. The film also touches the topic of religion, but maybe you want to discover by yourself.

I think the only negative fact the film has is the younger actors, Walt’s grandchildren. I think they have a baddie’s role but they don’t really know how to play it.

But I don’t want to finish with a negative fact. I really like this film. I recommend it (and I love its OST).

Clint Eastwood once more doesn’t disappoint us.