GRAN TORINO

            Racism, solitude, culpability, violence… They’re all problems which, far from disappear, affect our society of nowadays. Every and each day a person feels discriminated against simply because he/she is different from the others. Every and each day a person suffers because he/she doesn’t have a family or just someone who likes him/her. Every and each day a person feels torment, shame or even repugnance for the acts of his/her life. Every and each day thousands of people choose violence as a way of life or just as a way to achieve all expected. Gran Torino, a film produced in the year 2008, deals perfectly with all these problems in the scenario of a Hmong Neighbourhood.

            Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), an old Korean war vet, is the male lead of this film. His wife has recently died and he’s the last white person who lives in an old neighbourhood which has been repopulated with immigrants. He lives alone in an old house in which beer and a dog are his only company. Next door lives a Hmong family (people from Southeast Asia) whose two well brought-up kids, Thao and Sue manage to earn the affection of Mr. Kowalski with their tender and friendship. Thao, the first one, is a young boy who has no example to follow and has always been considered “a disaster”. Therefore, the young boy has no self-esteem and is completely lost in life. Sue, his sister, is a young girl who has always been “the favourite” of the family, a family only composed by women.

            During the film, one of the most important matters dealt with is racism. Racism is “the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races”. Racism has been one of the biggest problems faced by mankind and it affects our society every day. It affects all generations and all countries although it’s true that it’s more usual among the elders. Mr. Kowalski, at the beginning, is an extremely racist man who believes that “yellow people” are inferior to him. We can see a clear example of this belief in the scenes in which he spits to the ground of the Hmong family’s loan. In my opinion, although some people say that this problem has already been eradicated, I think we should work harder to create a better world in which all people understand, as Mr. Kowalski does in the film, that racial differences are not only prejudices created by our society but also a positive fact of our world from which we can learn a lot.

            Related to the topic of racism comes violence. Violence is a “behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something”. Every day, lots of people use violence to obtain what they want or simply as a “way to defend themselves”. In the film, violence appears continuously (both Walt Kowalski and the gang of youngsters use it) and, at the end, we learn that violence only takes us to a “sad final”.

            Finally, I think this film is a good lesson of social behaviour because we learn that violence and racism won’t take us anywhere. I have talked about racism and violence because I think they’re “the two biggest problems of mankind” and I wish that, after reading this review, you thought about them and tried to answer this question: are we so different?