Years ago, when I started dispensing my smart aleck movie opinions across the central Wisconsin airwaves, I decided on an evaluative approach that entailed treating each film entirely as its own entity. I made no assumption that viewers would go into the average new release with a full working knowledge of the filmmakers involved, so it made sense to me to do the best to set aside my own preconceptions. Though done with the best intentions, that methodology proved to be extremely difficult, unduly limiting and, frankly, not all that much fun. It was more interesting to consider, say, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear in the context of the extended thesis in moviemaking that is his career. How could he use a raw genre exercise to explore themes that he’d been wrestling with throughout his career. As the highest grossing Scorsese film to that point, there were surely people who were getting their first exposure the masterful filmmaker’s work by exchanging their money for a ticket and that ticket for a theater seat, but it felt shortsighted and flatly phony to consider the film in the guise of my best estimation of a newcomer’s experience. I thought of that a lot during Clint Eastwood’s new film Gran Torino because I can’t imagine approaching it without a general evaluation of Eastwood’s track record as a filmmaker and his status as an icon.

In Gran Torino, Eastwood casts himself as a Detroit widower, a retired autoworker who snarls at the changing world before him. His sturdy middle American neighborhood has been overrun with foreigners supplanting his old neighbors, and kids wear the darnedest things to church these days. He’s so curmudgeonly that his habit of flinging around racial slurs like a twenty-first century Archie Bunker doesn’t even abate when he begrudgingly befriends his Hmong neighbors. The film positions itself somewhat as a barbed, self-knowing exploration of prejudice among those who consider themselves the last defenders of true American culture, but much of Eastwood’s dialogue is toothless. He uses colorful slurs, but there’s little genuine hatred or fear behind his words. It’s all language, no attitude.

And that gets to the problematic nature of Eastwood playing the lead role. It’s rough enough that the film plays much of this racism for laughs, trying to elicit amusement from the backwards attitudes of this out-of-step man. Since Eastwood is a fairly straightforward filmmaker, delicate shifts in tone aren’t a strength, leading to giggly reactions of “oh, he’s so bad” even when the it seems the tone of the scenes should probably be pitched in a more troubling range. Eastwood, always more a presence and a persona than an actor, carries the burden on his history, as well. We know Eastwood too well to take him seriously in this role and he doesn’t dig deep enough to challenge preconceptions. Audiences love him to much, leading them to be too quick to forgive his character.

I could say forgiveness also comes too briskly from the well-staffed battalion of critics who’ve strangely anointed Eastwood as a director of storied greatness in his later career. He’s presided over some excellent films, to be sure, but he’s displayed no newfound consistency or depth. He is as good as whatever script he plucks off his desk and he’s just as likely to pull one that’s dreadful. His established filmography seems to be skewing things again, with a rush to interpret his recent output as a prolonged refutation of the violent blazers that elevated him to full-scale stardom in the first place. The man himself dismisses that notion, and recent comments that have him sounded more like the character he just played than the filmmaker who seems to be judging him only add an exclamation point to his denials.

There is the fair question of whether Eastwood’s intent or own evaluation of his work’s meaning ultimately matters. If people are finding a deconstruction of the first half of his career in the troubled relationship with violence evident in the second half, then some of that subtext is surely there. Certainly the only way Gran Torino‘s ending makes sense is thematically. I still find it difficult to see this film as cohesive, thoughtful work of art. I truly doubt Eastwood saw anything profound in the story; I suspect he responded to its potboiler trappings, its simplistic conflicts and its twist ending. It makes the other elements, the ones that have a chance to add something of value to our public discourse, feel damnably like throwaway details.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)