Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution –– although up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much. But it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque.

Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of the family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.”

Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness under Walt’s wing, while fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer.

All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death.

In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess,  and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit.