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Good Letters

20090202-the-way-they-do-it-by-ag-harmon[NOTE: Good Letters celebrates its one-year anniversary today. Please give a big virtual round of applause to the dozen writers who have donated their incredible gifts to making this blog possible. ]

From a safe, comfortable distance, those with self-satisfied hearts often reproach the likes of Walt Kowalski, Clint Eastwood’s character in the sleeper hit about gang violence, Gran Torino. An old, working-class man like Walt lives in a world he no longer recognizes, in crumbling neighborhoods where he no longer belongs—his name unpronounceable, his beliefs, honor system, and even face, a thing of derision.

Walt is the negative example of our times; championless, he must champion himself.

Eastwood took on this project, screen written by Nick Schenk from Dave Johannson’s story, after it was rejected many times. Without him, its chances must have been slim. With him, rather than another movie about what leads confused youths into gangs, with a faint, sub-text glorification of their garbage “culture” and ham-fisted messages about how “we’re all to blame”—we have Kowalski, a retired Detroit autoworker and war veteran who faces down that gang.

The character he plays is everything you’d expect—curmudgeonly, barb-tongued, but at the same time strong, manly (with no apologies for that word), decent; in short, a reality, not a cartoon. He may have a persona full of contradictions, but for any who bother to know him, such as a persistent young priest, he also has a unified soul. Despite a flurry of insults hurled his way, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley)—on a mission to get Walt to confession at his dead wife’s behest—knows the man deserves both admiration and sympathy; he bears a unique set of miseries. Regrets, he tells the priest, are mostly about “the things you weren’t ordered to do.”

Walt’s story is unraveled from the outside, until his essence is synonymous with his defining last act. When introduced at his wife’s funeral, he is bitter and hostile towards his sons’ families. But then, his grandchildren wear football jerseys and midriffs to the funeral, and giggle and text friends during the service. They talk to Walt only as a preface to beg something from him: furniture, season tickets, even his mint-condition 1972 Gran Torino.

The greater aggravation for Walt is what has happened to his neighborhood; Hmong families have moved in, and the family next door is a perplexity of oddities. But while he curses them under his breath, warns them off his lawn, and spits tobacco in their direction, the same is returned by the grandmother across the way. Walt’s sentiments are not unique to his class or race.

The paths of the neighbors cross when a young boy, Tao (Bee Vang), is bullied by a Hmong gang into stealing Walt’s vintage car. Suffice it to say, that doesn’t get done; Walt saves the family, then is impressed when they insist Tao atone for his offense with work. At length, Walt teaches the fatherless boy a trade and invests him with a spine. More importantly, he shows Tao how to get along with American men. In yet another unskeining of Walt’s character, the man takes the shy boy to a barber shop, where he explains a certain way men talk to each other: Tao watches as Walt and his Italian-American neighbor banter ethnic insults as part of their rough and tumble familiarity. In the process, Walt teaches the boy decorum; camaraderie is built over time, just as Walt’s elaborate workshop and tool collection took years to accumulate. The head-scratching friendship the two men exhibit is testament to a trust they’ve come to share, one that understands boundaries and appreciates jokes.

In the humorless aggrievement circles we live in now, it’s nearly impossible to see that the edge is taken off our differences, the tips broken off our lances, when people can kid around in this way. Tao’s sister, Sue (Ahney Her), intuits this; she back-and-forths with Walt, kidding about both her culture and his in a fashion that wins his admiration. Walt’s “slights” are often meant in a way wholly different from how they seem. Eventually, Tao wins a construction job under Walt’s coaching, and with his recommendation, by impressing a salty Irish foreman.

Thankfully, Walt is never “taught a lesson,” except when realizing that he has more in common with the traditional Hmong people than he does with his own children. Because it is not merely what a people does that make them unique—food, rites, dress, language—but the way they do it—that makes them admirable.

The Hmong value a code of hard work, good manners, respect for elders, telling the truth, and atoning for mistakes. These are not cultural prerogatives; they’re the essentials of any culture, at least any that has the right to call itself one. These ways are Walt’s ways, and through them, he finds a people strange only in the accidents, not in the substance.

In truth, they’ve known each other all along.

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