Torino Excelente

Earlier this year, film critic Roger Ebert, in his newish and popular blog, described the ways in which he is moved to tears during movies: “I never cry during sad moments in the movies, only during moments about goodness . . . What I experience is the welling up of a few tears in my eyes, a certain tightness in my throat, and a feeling of uplift.”

Ebert’s confession was part of a larger discussion about “positive psychology,” a recent movement in contemporary psychology that attempts to reconstruct human evolution based on our “positive” traits, such as kindness, generosity, love, and empathy, or what Dacher Keltner has called “survival of the kindest.” The trend sounds a little like Dr. Phil’s platitudes for getting real, but the practice has gained a marked respect in the mainstream media culture as well as in academics. Of course, there is something alluring, as well as radical, about academic respect for the study of goodness, what with the holy trinity of Hobbes-Nietzsche-Freud dominating politics, art, and psychology with such acrimony for so long.

The rest of Ebert’s blog entry is devoted to the moments in films that give rise to audience “elevation,” Jonathan Haidt’s term for the communal response “elicited by acts of virtue or moral beauty.” Ebert’s examples from film almost invariably come from the endings, and involve a sense of suspended joy; “When the movie is over, I don’t want to talk to anyone. After such movies I notice that many audience members remain in a kind of reverie.”

Now consider the moment in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino in which Thao is riding the Gran Torino by Lake Michigan and you can hear Walt Kowalski’s voice begin to sing the first lines of a little tune about a “heart inside a Gran Torino.” A cynic could quickly point out how manipulative the moment is, as if movies themselves are not manipulative by nature, but there is something pretty powerful in the scene that Ebert might identify as “human goodness.” I would also identify it as “human skill” because the movie earned that moment, which, given its premise, is no small feat. I reacted the same way Ebert would. Crying in movies is like eating a hamburger with a fried egg—it just creates the kind of satisfaction of a moment experienced well, a thing that momentarily reminds us that being human is way better than we’re told.

I will not proclaim that Gran Torino is the best movie I have ever seen. It is not the best Clint Eastwood movie I have ever seen. It isn’t even the best movie I have seen in the last month, but it is, in my cousin-in-law Caitlin’s word, fantastic. Eastwood consistently restores my faith in serious moviemaking: who doesn’t recall the time and place of their first Unforgiven viewing? Or their first The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly viewing? Unforgiven still astounds me, and I have seen it probably more than I have seen any other movie. Letters from Iwo Jima, which has a narrative oddly congruent with Gran Torino’s, was unforgettable. This is what I like: Eastwood does not deal in small themes: he goes for death, family, revenge, love, and God. Both Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino have more to say about our relationship to organized religion than any other recent movies I can think of, and what is said has nothing to do with the dialogue but everything to do with the fact that religion and theology are presences of irreducible consequence: a thing to be approached and wrestled, an institution and paradigm that gives meaning and meaninglessness their particular tenor.

I suppose this post is an attempt to start a conversation about the merits of Eastwood’s films, and this one in particular, which has sparked the ire of my tall, bespectacled friend, and his (and the other) arguments against the film boil down to these five complaints:

1) the acting is bad
2) the pacing and editing is off
3) Eastwood’s growl
4) the misrepresentation of gangsters
5) the contrived script

But let me dismiss these arguments as quickly as I can, although if pressed I would elaborate:

1) the acting is not bad, because half the movie is about characters that try to act a certain way, and their acting in that way does not suit them. Picking up mannerisms and phrases from a different culture creates a behavioral disconnect, which the movie explores often and well.
2) the pacing and editing is not off, but this is an Eastwood movie, and he always uses a deliberate pace with longer takes that allow conversations beyond just talking. I have come to
recognize this as part of his style—he even makes his thrillers do that, and it is at times unsettling and at times illuminating.
3) the growl doesn’t need to be defended because it was perfect.
4) the misrepresentation of gangsters is something I know little about, but because I know more about “representation” in general, let me use the “acting” argument from above: when you are adopting other mannerisms, the effect is always a misrepresentation, in the way that Harold Bloom calls all readings misreadings. Gangsterism is a performance. Besides, from the very little I know about the Hmong specifically, the representation of them seemed pretty accurate, because here we are no longer talking about a “performance” lifestyle.
5) The script is perhaps contrived, and I am not sure how to defend that but to say that the scenes that matter did not seem contrived at all: the scene of Walt eating the Hmong food with an expression of sheer delight, the scene in which the priest and Walt have a drink at the bar, the scene of Walt calling his son, the scene of Walt suggesting that his tools can be borrowed, and every scene in which the car is present. So I’ll pick my battles, and those scenes did not seem contrived to me. But even if they were, they were contrived with the purpose of allowing the audience to grapple with situations and compositions that matter.

Now, I have argued with my bespectacled friend often (he claims that Spielberg has never made a decent movie, even though he’s more right about that than his dislike of Eastwood flicks), and he is sneaky smart, so I have to be careful, but I will defend Eastwood’s body of work as ardently as I would defend that a fried egg is really good on a hamburger. Gran Torino was a Gran Pelicula.