The Good The Bad and the Immigrant Community

One of the side effects of living alone (and having a generous friend with a good collection of DVDs to lend) is that I end up watching a lot of movies in the evenings.  I am slightly ashamed to admit that not many of them have been in French, which is no doubt not the best way for me to immerse myself in the language, but Aurélie's collection is mostly English-language films, and a number of them were titles I had had on my list of things to see.  So it goes...

Most recently (i.e. tonight), I watched Gran Torino, a film which I had been meaning to see for a while, but had somehow not gotten around to it.  I'm glad I finally watched it, although it was sad--not as sad as Million Dollar Baby, but still dark and heartfelt, about people struggling out of bleak and desperate situations and trying to find a way to live their lives as best they can.  The film was not dark like a war-drama is dark; rather the bleakness was that of the ordinary lower working-class life, where the dangers of crime, violence, and loss of family hover just below the surface.  For what it was, I thought the film was a success.  Clint Eastwood is a great actor (and full of virility, even at 80), the character he played was a compelling one, and the relationship between him and the family of Hmong next door was portrayed in an affecting but not saccharine way (assisted by some good work by the supporting teenage actors).

However.  I said Eastwood's character was compelling.  That's not the same as his being likable.  He was more or less an awful, racist old man.  Although he always did the right thing when the situation called for it, I think that the question that I was left with after the movie was, where do you draw the line between the big character flaws and the little ones?  How much prejudice can you get away with when you are moral about the big picture?  And who defines the big picture?  When should we ignore the differences in perspective between ourselves and other people, and when not?

Ultimately, the answer that the movie gave was that the important issues, the questions where your responses really matter, are those about maintaining your family, protecting the innocent, and doing right by your own life.  Those are principles I can go along with, although I am not sure what the movie says about the importance of being armed in your own home.  Parts of it were a little cowboy for me, but I was impressed with the twist at the end.  I thought he was going to go all Death Wish in the final scene, and was pleased that he did not.  It made the ending very poignant.

One last word about big versus little character flaws, and then I'll move on: Although Eastwood's character slung around a lot of racist epithets in the screenplay, during his one interaction with Afro-American teenagers, he did not use the n-word.  I think if he had, it would have changed the way his character appeared, in terms of his ultimate moral make-up, at least to an American viewer.  I am not sure what that says, that that is the prejudice we as a culture cannot look beyond and cannot forgive a person for displaying openly, or that it is still powerful enough, and the shadow of that particular oppression is so long, that that form of hatred cannot come up in movies without the entire movie having to be about it.  Probably both.