Birth Days

Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino begins and ends with a funeral in a traditional Catholic church. Both services open with what are, seemingly, the two biggest questions we are called upon to ask throughout our lives: What is life? What is death? And while these questions significantly frame what happens in the film, the most powerful question worth asking (and answering) turns out to be an entirely different one—one that is, in a single, revealing moment, only implied by the film: When is your birthday?

Walter Kowalski, Eastwood’s rail-thin, grizzled character, is a widower living in an old neighborhood that has been, as the film portrays it from his perspective, invaded by minorities, especially Hmong people and Hmong gangs. Throughout the film, Kowalski liberally and angrily spits out a colorful variety of racial slurs that seem to indicate his distaste for his diverse environment. His old world racism is balanced out, however, by an equally rabid sense of justice. In many ways, this role is one we are used to seeing Eastwood play, but here the lone, gunslinging, steely-eyed cowboy has been resurrected in a multicultural context. We soon see, too, that his use of language is less about division than connection. 

And, as we might expect of Dirty Harry, actions speak louder than words in this film.  After Kowalski intervenes one night to save his young neighbor from a gang banger cousin, the entire Hmong community begins to leave him offerings of food and flowers to show their appreciation. Kowalski is not immediately won over; however, over time he is drawn into communion with the Hmong people. On his birthday, after a misguided attempt by his son to celebrate it with him, he is invited to participate in a feast at his neighbor’s house. He grudgingly attends and then, after an epiphany provoked by a reading from a medicine man, realizes that he has more in common with these neighbors than he does with his own family. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror as he comes to this conclusion, he says to his reflection, “Happy Birthday.”

Walter Kowalski’s birth day is the day he learns to embrace the true members of his community. In this film, community is not determined by race or neighborhood as much as it is defined by the ability of people to nourish one another. Community, in other words, is not something localized, static, or exclusive. The vintage 1972 Ford automobile that gives the film its title (and that Kowalski washes as tenderly as though it were a baby) symbolizes the changing nature of community in America. Like the prized vehicle and like the care-giving community that we participate in every day, this one is on wheels and, in the end, has a reach unlimited by race, ethnicity, age, or blood.