Pierced to the Heart

How the backstory adds to the film's impact

The part of the story around Gran Torino that I want to focus on doesn’t so much add to its impact. It’s about the impact of film more generally, based on how we engage with it. There’s an interesting dichotomy of opinion about Gran Torino that relates very much to the perspectives behind these film talks on . Although on IMDb’s all-time top 250 films list Gran Torino comes in, as of this writing, at #86, some critics quite heartily panned the film. Most any film will have those that do and don’t like it, but what is curious to me is the wide range of positive (and overly positive) comments versus the vitriolic nature of some critics’ comments. I agree that the film has technical flaws in its script, acting, and directing, yet I find strengths in the film that, on balance, wash over its flaws. Here are examples of strong negative reactions to Gran Torino:

• “Never have I seen a film as blatantly stupid as GRAN TORINO taken so seriously by so many non-idiots.” (Mike D’Angelo, posted on Twitter)
• “The script is preposterous. Beyond that, I have nothing to say about this film.” (Michael Sicinski)
• “I thoroughly enjoyed myself laughing at one of the worst screenplays I’ve ever seen and one of the worst performances by a professional actor…” (vjmorton)
• “But far more importantly, GRAN TORINO and Eastwood’s performance … rrrrr … are so (literally) laughably bad, camp-masterpiece bad (“get me some of that good gook food”), in every facet of execution … that an attempt at Christ-sacrifice profundity in the last scene can only appeal to my sense of irony. Plus it proves that the rest of the movie wasn’t an intentional parody (“Eastwood really takes this seriously,” you’re saying to yourself while clutching your head in disbelief).” (vjmorton)
• “Gran Torino is a bad film, yes, but at least it has the decency to be an exquisitely bad film of the type you can enjoy if you can get your head in the right place, see it with a few buddies, and one-up one another in deriding plot holes and predicting developments…let me just say that I think it is Eastwood’s presence that ultimately causes the film to implode.” (Ken Morefield)

Why is the demeaning attitude so strong in such comments? It is not as if there is no reason: In most cases, the critics go on to list specific objections, sometimes in a serious way, sometimes in a caustic or sarcastic way. Whether with these specific examples or similar comments on other films by other critics, my conclusion is that comments like these tend to come from one of two places: Either a critic requires a film to first pass a certain high level of arthouse film credibility before they will consider it worthy of engaging with, or a critic evaluates a film heavily from an entertainment perspective (i.e., did the film provide a good couple of hours of escape). For these critics, Gran Torino didn’t pass either test. By contrast, the idea behind these talks on is to, with grace toward a film’s failings, look first to what the film is trying to do. What is the film exploring? What is it doing with the raw materials that the filmmakers have assembled? What substance is there, even if the filmcraft is not the best? To be sure, some films fail at both filmcraft and substance. Indeed we are right to want to spend our time with better films rather than worse ones, and we should not be shy to say that a film has failings. Yet in the end, I’d rather see a film with strong substance and weak filmcraft than vice versa. Either way, though, once the two hours are invested, I’ll ask what can I walk away with? What can I take away from a lesser film in spite of itself?

Don’t get me wrong: I wanted Gran Torino’s filmcraft to be better. Yet, if I hadn’t looked past its issues and saw the power in its story, I wouldn’t have been struck by the power of its metaphor of how grace and sacrifice absorb evil. Had the filmcraft been better, I think the film’s impact would have been deeper and would have come quicker — I had to spend a long time reflecting on the film to put the pieces together. Still, the film was good enough that, upon first seeing it, I could sense that something deeper was going on. The more I wrestled with it, the more I found connections between the pieces of the film and could access the story’s deeper power. I take the aggregate ratings of IMDb’s users to mean that many regular folk could also sense the film’s credible and deeper impact.

As I see it, critics that pan Gran Torino without grace toward its failings ironically play the part of Walt Kowalski in the first half of the film. No doubt these critics have love to give toward some, but towards Gran Torino, they were quick to judge, caustic in their words, and have no patience to look for what value might lie behind its weaknesses.

Tags: Drama

 October 31, 2009, 13:59 UTC (updated July 25, 2014, 21:01 UTC)
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