Top Ten del 2009 - Puesto N° 8

Gran Torino, de Clint Eastwood

Una suerte de despedida para un prototipo e ícono que Eastwood supo representar a lo largo de su carrera, en filmes que van de "Harry el sucio" hasta "Los imperdonables", pasando por tantos otros. Dando una nueva vuelta al tema de la venganza (o no), Clint elige pasar por alto la búsqueda emocional algo más evidente (y para muchos, impostada) de buena parte de sus últimos filmes, para recuperar ese tono narrativo más simple, clásico y old school de gran parte de sus filmes de los años '80. El final es memorable, y no sé porqué pero me acordé mucho de esta película viendo el otro día "Avatar". Bah, sí se porqué, se darán cuenta cuando la vean...

'Eighty? It's just a number' - Clint Eastwood Interview (The Guardian)

Emma Brockes meets Clint Eastwood, one of the last American heroes, to talk about films, politics, ageing ... and the truth about that Spike Lee spat

People who have worked with Clint Eastwood invariably talk about the first time he rang and the effect of his creaky, whispery voice on their nervous system. In a studio on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, his arrival is counted down in paces between the coffee urn and the biscuit tray, while outside people queue for a chatshow next door and executives glide to lunch in their golf buggies. Eastwood enters with an awkward, loping gait, as from another era. He has made films of every stripe in the past 10 years, but for most of us he will always be that man: who starts a fight in a saloon, who defends a lady's honour, who, now that Paul Newman is gone, is one of the last American heroes. Or, as he puts it with conscientious self-mockery and a flash of his green, green eyes, "the jerk from the plains".

Longevity in Hollywood can inspire embarrassing devotion and Eastwood, heading towards 80, finds much of what comes his way unseemly. Men have a hard time comporting themselves in his presence; women make regrettable observations about his green eyes. The myth is so established, one forgets that in the 60s and early 70s, he made a lot of schlocky, forgettable westerns as well as classics such as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. The cowboy, marshal or gunslinger whose idea of showing emotion is to shift a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other is a heroic type we are supposed to have outgrown. And yet the glamour persists, entwined as it is with ideas of what it is to be American and a nostalgia, perhaps, for less officious eras. Eastwood didn't say much in those films, but what he did say - "You didn't hear the lady, did you, boy?", "Cool it, cowboy", "Next time I'll knock your damn head off" - compacted over time into legend. Even the most banal line - "Put your pants on, chief" - was transformed by Eastwood's growl into something sounding like wisdom.

Today he settles in his director's chair with the cool, polite detachment he reserves, one imagines, for outlaws and journalists. There are spots of high colour on his cheeks that make him look, oddly, rather vulnerable and take the menace out of his pointy incisors. Eastwood's tough-guy image was always leavened by something soft at the edges, the beauty spot above his lip, the fact that he was, throughout the 60s, very obviously a man who got as much use out of his hairdryer as Warren Beatty. He worked hard to break the mould of that early career in a way he now jokes about. Eastwood is about to cast for a film about Nelson Mandela, adapted from John Carlin's book, and when I ask who will play him, he looks devilish and says, "I'm going to play him. I'm going to show you my versatility." (It will actually be Morgan Freeman. "Perfect casting for Mandela.")

One way or another, Eastwood's interests always seem to come back to the issue of heroism, particularly to the unsympathetic hero. In his new film, Gran Torino, he plays Walt Kowalski, a trigger-happy, cantankerous old bigot (imagine if Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond had been armed) who learns over time to love his Korean neighbours more than his petulant family and to make a great sacrifice for them. It sounds corny, but it's a better film than Million Dollar Baby, the sentimental Oscar-winner he directed in 2004 and in which he played a similar role. Once Eastwood stops snarling and overacting - a pitfall of directing oneself - he turns in a touching performance and the film is funny and moving and unexpectedly shocking. Did he want to play Walt from the off?

"Yeah."

Yeah?

"Yeah."

Right. Eventually, he continues: "Yeah, I liked the dilemmas he had to go through. I liked the message of antique America that is maybe obsolete. Walt may be obsolete." He laughs gently. "But he does learn new things. And that's what makes it interesting. You take a guy who's way out opinionated, insulting to equal opportunity" - this sounds like a phrase he's had to adjust to - "an insulter, and you put him with people where he's antagonistic as hell. And then all of a sudden he looks in the mirror and says, 'I have more in common with these people than my own spoilt, rotten family.' He's realising these folks like having him around, even though he's not particularly on the surface likable."

The film nervously calibrates Walt's bigotry by going overboard with examples of affectionate racial mockery between Irish, Italians and Poles to show that, you know, there are levels to these things. I ask whether he was anxious about getting this tone right. "I wasn't anxious about anything. I figure one thing when you get to my age is, what can they do to ya?" Likewise, he bats away being overlooked at the Oscars. Gran Torino was number one at the US box office but didn't get a single nomination. "I have had three films nominated out of the last five I've made. I just make the film the best I can. The rest is political stuff and posturing. I'm not terribly good at that. I think our message was as good as any message out there this year. There we are."

At some point, the reticence of Dirty Harry and Joe Kidd turned into the old-age misanthropy of Walt Kowalski and Frankie Dunn, and when, in 2000, Eastwood made Space Cowboys with Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland, the joke was it should have been called Grumpy Old Astronauts. At 78, he is still wiry and tough looking, but his posture is bad and his famous whisper sounds, occasionally, like the frailty of age. "Eighty is just a number," he says. "A lot of people are old at 40." No twinges of vanity when he sees himself on screen? "It's too late for vanity. If I was 30, maybe, I'd say, 'Hey, that's not a good angle.' But there is no good angle now. So you just kinda accept it and go ahead."

Eastwood is kept young, perhaps, by his family; he has seven children who range in age from 12 to their early 40s. The 12-year-old daughter, Morgan, lives with him and his second wife, Dina Ruiz, a former TV anchorwoman from Arizona. He married his first wife, Maggie Johnson, when he was 21 and had two children with her. They didn't divorce for 30 years, during which time he had a child with Roxanne Tunis, two with Jacelyn Reeves and one with Frances Fisher, while conducting a long relationship with the actor Sondra Locke. I wonder if Morgan thinks he's cool or embarrassing. Eastwood looks surprised. "I think she thinks I'm a cool dad. We get along very well. I have a teenage daughter as well. And I think they think I'm all right. I'm not totally objective. I don't think they think of me as a guy who should be their grandfather. I used to joke about it: that my kids didn't give me any grand- children, so I just had my own grandchildren."

One imagines that being the son of Clint Eastwood throws up very particular problems, as being the daughter of some icon of femininity might for a girl. I ask if his sons have had a tougher time of it than his daughters. "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think so." He pauses. "Maybe." Another long pause. "I don't think they need to get screwed up. The parents have to keep instilling in them the logic of life. Not everyone becomes a known figure. There's disadvantages to it and there's advantages to it. Don't try to make it any more than it is." This isn't, of course, something he can entirely control, the way his fame affects his children. "You're never in total control. But you have to have ambitions to set the agenda and fate does the rest."

Control is a big thing for Eastwood, whose "logic of life" is deeply entwined with his Libertarian politics, which he brings up with a wry smile, taking into account that most people think Libertarianism is at best unrealistic and at worst crackpot. He registered as a Republican in 1951 in support of Eisenhower, whom he admired for his second world war heroism and election promise to end the war in Korea. Eastwood's short tenure as mayor of Carmel, the town south of San Francisco where he lives, was premised, he told the New Yorker, on "doing things for people who can't stand up for themselves". Since then, he says, the Republican party has lost its way - he was not in favour of going to war in Iraq, and the evangelical side of the party annoys him. "The only thing John McCain and I really agreed upon was that the Republicans had lost their way because they lost their philosophy." The core of that philosophy, he says, is that "people should be responsible for themselves and fiscal responsibility is very, very important." He says of the current economic crisis: "The great saying that if you don't pay attention to history you're doomed to repeat it is pretty much true. Pretty much true. Now we're repeating it. You get what you deserve."

For the election, his wife registered as an independent, although, he says, they both thought, "Obama seemed like a nice guy." And Eastwood? "I registered," he smiles, "Libertarian. I like the philosophies. The Libertarian party is nothing and they don't have any candidates. But I do believe if we just leave everybody alone, quit trying to think of ways to run everybody else's life, maybe we'd be better off. It may be impractical. It may be obsolete, that kind of thinking." He looks off into the distance: "It's just kinda the way I was raised."

Eastwood's long-term vision about his career was unusual both in its accuracy and the tenacity with which he pursued it. In his early 30s, he could see that if he carried on making westerns they would get worse and he would eventually fall out of fashion. The way to save himself was to diversify. He is a pianist and has written the scores for many of his films, but it was to directing that he turned. He had campaigned to direct episodes of Rawhide, the TV series that started his career; the studio refused, but finally, in 1971, he was given Play Misty For Me, a low-budget film about a woman stalking a local radio star. Misty is still a tense, well-managed thriller today, although there is a self-indulgent bit where the character played by Eastwood and his girlfriend frolic on a beach, in a wood and under a waterfall, that would presage overlong sequences in many of his films. Directing, he says, is the greater joy. "You're the storyteller. As an actor you're just involved with the one component, your component. And your relationship to the ensemble. I prefer directing. I have to. I'm at the age where I should. So."

Eastwood is not a shouter on set; his is a quiet authority. Apart from Spike Lee, no one in the industry seems to have a bad word for him. He is said to be gentlemanly to a fault, professional, deeply engaged. He is also disinclined to censor himself. It is customary when making a film based on a novel not to bad-mouth the source material. In 1995 he made The Bridges Of Madison County, one of the directing roles that, with Unforgiven, raised his profile as a serious director; he called Robert James Waller's novel "fancy, pretentious writing" that he had "fought" to get through. His tiff with Spike Lee last year followed Lee's accusations that Eastwood did not include any black soldiers in his second world war film Flags Of Our Fathers, the story of the men who raised the US flag after the battle of Iwo Jima. It is a bleak, beautiful film that seems to go on for several days and, amid all the battle scenes, exploits what Eastwood has always done best: stillness. He replied that Lee should "shut his face" - the film was historically accurate. Now he says, "It wasn't really a tiff. I was in Cannes and somebody said that he was quoted saying this and that. Some journalist. And I said, well if he said that... and I shot my mouth off. But he's a nice guy. I think Spike was just trying to promote his flick. I understand the game." He grins. "I just thought I wasn't going to let him off the hook."

He won't speculate on how he has influenced cinema, or who he considers to be the heirs to Dirty Harry or Josey Wales. Jason Bourne, perhaps, although he gets too weepy over his dead girlfriend. Eastwood never betrayed an interior life beyond the hint of a secret sadness. He never fell for the posse mentality, and even when he was playing a cop, he was as suspicious of the law as of the outlaws - in Hang 'Em High, a judge admonishes his Marshal Jedediah Cooper: "You can be the best I've ever had, the best there is, if you remember this: you work for the government. You work for justice." His characters didn't work for anyone, of course, which is why we'll always love them. For his own inspiration, he says, he looked to John Wayne and Gary Cooper, "old-time movie actors. I was influenced by James Cagney a lot. I liked his inner vitality. And he was fearless. Not afraid to do crazy things, take a grapefruit in the face. I've always felt that suited me as well."

What is that, not being afraid to fail? "I think it's just... not being afraid." He quotes FDR - "The only thing to fear is fear itself" - then repeats it in a silly voice, to show he isn't that pompous. "Anyway, it was like that mentality. Yeah, I'll just barge in, make that commitment, go for it, otherwise you miss great opportunities to enjoy yourself and have fun and create characters that are interesting. Sometimes you have to swing hard and miss the ball. But you have to swing hard."

Given his fame, Eastwood has an unusually sensible attitude. He hasn't burned out, or become an addict, or cast himself against women half his age. There's no great mystery to it, he says. "Just stacking up information. Not forgetting it." He drops his voice even lower than his usual whisper and leans in. "Not forgetting." His eyes really are very green.

The Films Are for Him. Got That? (The New York Times)

By BRUCE HEADLAM

CARMEL, Calif.

BEING introduced to Clint Eastwood is something like seeing a California redwood for the first time. The difference is that this redwood, even at the age of 78, reaches out to shake your hand with a firmness that still intimidates no matter how much time you spent preparing your grip (for the record: three days).

He arrived for the interview at the Mission Ranch restaurant here as if he owned the place, and it didn’t make any difference that, in this case, he does. He had his first legal drink in the bar while he was stationed at the nearby Army base in the late 1940s. In 1986 he bought the property and rebuilt it to his taste, with a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

It’s been 20 years since Mr. Eastwood was mayor of Carmel, but clearly he’s still the king around here. Unlike the taciturn characters he plays on screen, he’s voluble, chatting and laughing with his staff with a sharpness and enthusiasm that make him seen far younger than his age. After showing me around the property, he insisted I come back that evening for a steak dinner. “We’ve got good chow,” he said. Go on: you tell him you’ve made other plans.

Mr. Eastwood’s on familiar ground in another way. It’s coming up on the Oscars, and he has two films in contention, “Changeling,” with Angelina Jolie, and his newest, “Gran Torino,” which he finished shooting only this summer and which began appearing in theaters on Friday.

In “Gran Torino” Mr. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran, retired Ford line worker and full-time bigot who stews on his porch in Detroit watching his block being taken over by Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. When a gang pressures a teenager living next door (played by Bee Vang) into trying to steal Walt’s vintage Gran Torino, the aging veteran gets pulled reluctantly, then violently, into the lives of his neighbors.

Mr. Eastwood has already won the best actor prize for “Gran Torino” from the National Board of Review, and the Oscar talk — he has never won as an actor — is running high. He claims not to care deeply about awards. When asked whom he makes films for, Mr. Eastwood said, “You’re looking at him.” Calculated or not — those films do have a habit of showing up (sometimes unexpectedly) in prime Oscar campaigning season — that stance seems to charm the voters some 300 miles to the south in Los Angeles, who have rewarded his movies richly in the past 15 years, including two best-picture awards. Mr. Eastwood has become the George Washington of the awards season: if called, he will serve. But he doesn’t seem to believe in term limits.

“Gran Torino” is the 29th full-length movie Mr. Eastwood has directed — more than Scorsese, more even than Spielberg — so perhaps it’s an accident of memory that his name first conjures up the impression of the squinty guy on a horse. Starting in the mid-1980s he began to change some minds by pushing the boundaries of his cowboys-and-cops image with films like “Honkytonk Man” and “Tightrope,” but he said about his reputation, “If that’s how people want to pigeonhole me, that’s fine.”

If anything, his directing pace has picked up in the past five years.

The script for “Gran Torino” had been kicking around Hollywood for a while before Mr. Eastwood read it. The writer, Nick Schenk, who worked in a Ford plant years ago, based the character of Walt on the men he met there, many of them Korean War veterans. “I’d talk a lot to these guys, and they’d tell me stuff they wouldn’t tell their wife and kids,” Mr. Schenk said.

Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”

Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, and announcing he was returning to the first draft. “I’m emasculating this thing,” he told Mr. Peoples.

There was one major disappointment for Mr. Schenk: the setting of “Gran Torino” was shifted from Minneapolis to Detroit, the original home of Ford and, not coincidentally, the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there. (That helped make it easy for Warner Brothers to sign off on bankrolling the movie, something that hasn’t always been a given in the studio’s relationship with the director.)

Mr. Eastwood bought the script in February, then shot the movie over the summer at a guerrilla filmmaker’s pace, finishing in 32 days. The fast clip, Mr. Eastwood said, helped him with the Hmong members of the cast, most of whom had never acted and many of whom didn’t speak English. “I’d give them little pointers along the way, Acting 101,” he said. “And I move along at a rate that doesn’t give them too much of a chance to think.”

It also doesn’t give Mr. Eastwood too much time to worry about Hollywood. After shooting, he returned to Carmel, where he lives with his wife, Dina Ruiz, and manages his investments, including an ownership stake in the Pebble Beach golf course company. He set up a bay and worked with his two film editors in an 1862 farmhouse on the Mission property for a week or so. Between sessions he sat at the piano and picked out a score: he has written music, including full scores, for many of his films. He even sings one of his own melodies over the film’s final credits, his voice burned down to a whisper. (Mr. Eastwood himself refuses to call it singing because that conjures up memories of “Paint Your Wagon,” the misbegotten 1969 musical. “I vowed I’d never do that again,” he said.)

Like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” before it, “Gran Torino” is a modern story that feels anachronistic. Walt’s neighborhood is every bit as bounded and knowable as the town of Lago in “High Plains Drifter,” and the confrontations with the Hmong gang members build methodically, as if in a town square. But when the film threatens to descend into a vigilante picture — the last guy who actually thought he could solve Detroit’s problems with his fists was Gordie Howe — “Gran Torino” takes some unexpected turns.

Before filming there had been gossip (again, the Internet) that Mr. Eastwood was making another “Dirty Harry” sequel. What “Gran Torino” does share with the “Dirty Harry” movies is the sheer force of its incorrectness. Walt, who stokes his resentment with cigarettes, beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon, expresses his disgust for the Hmong and just about every other racial group in a steady stream of obscenities. Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s frequent producing partner, said that what he appreciated about Mr. Schenk’s dialogue was that “he didn’t hold back.”

“It was left really raw,” he said. “It sounded like those people you know, or your uncle saying something really bad at a wedding.”

Brian Grazer, a producer of “Changeling,” sees this kind of directness as a strength. “What most interested me about Clint Eastwood as a director is the honesty and intensity he injects into the movies that he directs,” he said. “He is so confident as a director that he will allow the sometimes ugliness of life to live inside the scenes of his movies.”

For Mr. Eastwood the raw language is central to Walt’s story. “If he comes in and just befriends these people and doesn’t have any hurdles — any personal hurdles to overcome — that doesn’t make for a very interesting character,” he said. But Mr. Eastwood, who last spring had a verbal run-in with Spike Lee over the lack of black soldiers in the Eastwood film “Flags of Our Fathers,” also confesses to some sympathy for Walt’s choice of words in a way sure to irk the Hollywood types who have finally embraced him despite his libertarian politics.

“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness,” he said. “You’re showing a guy from a different generation. Show the way he talks. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so” — here he paused and narrowed his eyes, like Dirty Harry drawing a bead on a perp — “sensitive.”

What we admire about heroes (and villains) like the ones Mr. Eastwood used to play isn’t their sensitivity, it’s their single-mindedness: they say what they’re going to do, then do it. Whether in Spain or in San Francisco, Mr. Eastwood’s heroes were never given the “kill one to save a thousand” liberal trapdoor of other Hollywood films. The violence of the “Dirty Harry” movies seems almost quaint now, but what Harry says — “Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” — still has the power to shock.

But if Mr. Eastwood shoulders some blame for every “Rambo” and “Die Hard” that followed, he should be given credit for looking at a more complicated transaction in the films he directs, one where people’s actions are at odds with their beliefs. What helps sell the contradiction in “Gran Torino” is Mr. Eastwood’s own physical presence. More so than any other leading man, he has been willing to play his real age. At 78 he is perhaps thinner than he once was, but in that sinewy way that reveals strength as much as diminishes it. After Walt beats up one gang member — hey, he’s still Clint Eastwood — the next scene shows him out of breath, struggling to open his front door.

To Mr. Eastwood being able to play 78 is just one of the benefits of a long career. “It’s ridiculous when you won’t play your own age,” he said. “You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.”

The other benefit is that, even after a great career in the movies, you can fashion another. “After ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ I walk down the street and everybody would whistle out” — here he sang the movie’s famous theme. “Then it became ‘Do I feel lucky?’ and ‘Make my day.’ But it’s progressed along. Whether it’s taken this turn on purpose, I can’t say.”

Walt Kowalski has a catchphrase too in “Gran Torino.” “This is what I do,” he tells the Hmong teenager before the film’s final act. “I finish things.” So does Mr. Eastwood, just not in the way anybody would have expected.

And he may not be done. There were reports — again on the Internet — that this would be his last role, a rumor he helped fuel but now says is not necessarily true.

“Somebody asked what I’d do next, and I said I didn’t know how many roles there are for 78-year-old guys,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with coming in to play the butler. But unless there’s a hurdle to get over, I’d rather just stay behind the camera.”

"Gran Torino", de Clint Eastwood (The New York Times Review)

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done. This year’s model is “Gran Torino,” a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the U.S.A., in that industrial graveyard called Detroit. I’m not sure how he does it, but I don’t want him to stop. Not because every film is great — though, damn, many are — but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.

Few Americans make movies about this country anymore, other than Mr. Eastwood, a man whose vitality as an artist shows no signs of waning, even in a nominally modest effort like “Gran Torino.” Part of this may be generational: Mr. Eastwood started as an actor in the old studio system, back when the major movie companies were still in the business of American life rather than just international properties. Hollywood made movies for export then, of course, but part of what it exported was an idea of America as a democratic ideal, an idea of greatness which, however blinkered and false and occasionally freighted with pessimism, was persuasive simply because Gene Kelly and John Wayne were persuasive.

While it’s easy to understand why the last eight years (or the last 50) have made it difficult to sell that idea to the world or even the country, it’s dispiriting that so many movies are disconnected from everyday experience, from economic worries to race. Pauline Kael used to beat up on Stanley Kramer, the director of earnest middlebrow entertainments like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” but at least these movies had a connection to real life or an idea about it. Ms. Kael also famously branded Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” as “deeply immoral,” even fascistic, but the film became a classic because of its ambiguous engagement with American violence and masculinity. Mr. Eastwood and a .44 Magnum did their bit too.

Dirty Harry is back, in a way, in “Gran Torino,” not as a character but as a ghostly presence. He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course most obviously in Mr. Eastwood’s face. It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood. Words like flinty and steely come to mind, adjectives that Mr. Eastwood, in his performance as Walt Kowalski, expressively embodies with his usual lack of fuss and a number of growls. A former auto worker at Ford, Walt has just put his longtime wife in the ground when the story opens. From his scowl, it looks as if he would like to join her.

Instead he sits on his front porch chugging can after can of cheap beer in the company of his yellow Labrador, Daisy, watching the world at a safe distance with a squint and a stream of bitter commentary. Kept at bay, the remaining members of his family — including two sons with big houses, big cars, big waistlines — have no choice but to let him stew alone. Yet the rest of the world refuses to leave Walt be, despite his best efforts and grimace. The world first creeps into his peripheral vision, where a family of Hmong immigrants live in the rundown house next door; and then, through a series of unfortunate events, some artful and others creaking with scripted contrivance, it stages a life-altering home invasion.

Written by a newcomer, Nick Schenk, the story eases into gear with an act of desperation.Under violent threat from some Hmong gangbangers, the next-door neighbor’s teenage son, Thao (Bee Vang), tries and fails to steal Walt’s cherry 1972 Gran Torino, and in the bargain nearly loses his life to its angry, armed owner. Thao’s family, led by his mouthy, friendly sister, Sue (a very good Ahney Her), forces the teenager to do penance by working for Walt, an arrangement that pleases neither the man nor the boy. No one seems a more unlikely (or reluctant) father surrogate than Walt, a foulmouthed bigot with an unprintable epithet for every imaginable racial and ethnic group. Growling — often literally, “Grr, grr” — he resists the family’s overtures like a man under siege, walled in by years of suspicion, prejudice and habit.

Walt assumes his protector role gradually, a transformation that at first plays in an often broadly comic key. Mr. Eastwood’s loose, at times very funny performance in the early part of the film is one of its great pleasures. While some of this enjoyment can be likened to spending time with an old friend, Mr. Eastwood is also an adept director of his own performances and, perhaps more important, a canny manipulator of his own iconographic presence. He knows that when we’re looking at him, we’re also seeing Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name and all his other outlaws and avenging angels who have roamed across the screen for the last half-century. All these are embedded in his every furrow and gesture.

These spectral figures, totems of masculinity and mementos from a heroic cinematic age, are what make this unassuming film — small in scale if not in the scope of its ideas — more than just a vendetta flick or an entertainment about a crazy coot and the exotic strangers next door. As the story unfolds and the gangbangers return and Walt reaches for his gun, the film moves from comedy into drama and then tragedy and then into something completely unexpected. We’ve seen this western before, though not quite. Because this isn’t John Wayne near the end of the 20th century, but Clint Eastwood at the start of the still-new 21st, remaking the image of the hero for one more and perhaps final time, one generation of Americans making way for the next.

That probably sounds heavier than I mean, but “Gran Torino” doesn’t go down lightly. Despite all the jokes — the scenes of Walt lighting up at female flattery and scrambling for Hmong delicacies — the film has the feel of a requiem. Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.

“Gran Torino” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film has some exceedingly foul language, a great many racist slurs and bloody violence.

GRAN TORINO

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Nick Schenk, based on a story by Dave Johannson and Mr. Schenk; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designer, James J. Murakami; produced by Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz and Bill Gerber; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

WITH: Clint Eastwood (Walt Kowalski), Bee Vang (Thao Lor), Ahney Her (Sue Lor) and Christopher Carley (Father Janovich).