We rented the movie Gran Torino this weekend. This is a great movie with an uplifting message. The liberal will appeciate its message about racial tolerance, if they can get past the rather scandalous racial epithets the main character employs throughout. The conservative will appreciate its message about work and self-improvement. Either way you look at it, this is a great movie for our times.
Some people like Clint Eastwood and some don't. Personally, I've always found his tough, laconic, no-nonsense roles to be appealing. Too many people say too many things; his characters don't talk much, they just do things. In Gran Torino, Clint's character, Walter Kowalski, is a Korean War veteran who's having trouble overcoming the demons of his past and the things he had to do in wartime. Because of this he's very hostile about the Asian family who moves in next door. He doesn't like the Asian and Latino gangs, or the immigrants who've changed the character of his neighborhood. The boy next door is cajoled by an Asian gang into trying to steal his vintage car (the movie's namesake), which leads to an angry confrontation. But gradually the boy's sister wins him over with kindness, and he gradually opens up to them and even comes to become a mentor to the timid boy who tried to steal his car. The boy wants revenge after the gang riddles his house with bullets, but Walter doesn't allow his to take revenge, knowing how much it will poison the boy's soul, just as his was by the blood he was forced to shed in wartime. Instead, he ends up making the supreme sacrifice in order to get the gang that has been harassing his neighbors off the streets. And he wills the car to the boy, rather than to the family that just seemed concerned with getting their hands on his house and putting him in a nursing home.
Watching this movie with my kids, I was struck by several important lessons it has for us today. There are those I know who avoid Hollywood and anything it produces like the plague, and though there is a lot of poisonous junk in popular culture there are also gems along the way. Some of the inspiring lessons we can glean from this movie are--
(1) The way the Hmong family continued to reach out to him, despite his spewing of racist epithets and outward hostility. By small acts of kindness they eventually broke through his tough exterior and bitterness.
(2) The way his own family shamefully showed they were only concerned with their inheritance (which they did not get) after his wife died--how his granddaughter asked what he would do with the car "after he died," and how his son and daughter-in-law brought him brochures for an old folks home on his birthday. They felt a sense of entitlement because they were blood, but in the end it was those who truly befriended and cared about him who received the car, a symbol of his legacy.
(3) Finally, how he befriended the boy and taught him the duty and honor of hard work, buying him tools and exhorting him to resist being dragged into the maelstrom of the gangs. This family showed a lot of soul and a lot of guts lifting themselves up when everything around them was trying to drag them down. As the Hmong girl said, in her culture, "the girls go to college and the boys go to jail." They strugged heroically to break that cycle.
This resonates with a number of things from my philosophy--how we should not judge people or circumstances by appearances (the hero's gruff exterior and rough talk, the differences of culture), how we have a duty to rise about circumstance and the spiral of self-destruction, and how learning and self-improvement are the key to rising above.
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