Eastwood, Religion, and Gran Torino

Unlike the other two-thirds of this blog, I like Clint Eastwood, and I like his movies. I like that he still understands the need to make both commercial and critical faire. I like that he leaves his movies rough and tumble, not super slick and perfect. I like that he often writes his own scores. And I like the fact that he uses his oh-so-American personae to critique America.

Part of this critique is a consistent counter-narrative to the dominant Western Christian narrative of redemption, especially redemption in death. In response, Clint says, “But what if, end the end, no one is redeemed? What if there is no redemption in the death and suffering of the innocent? What if the strong survive and religious belief is just something to help you sleep at night?” While he is by no means the only film maker out there wrestling with these issues, he’s the biggest and seems to do so the most dispassionately—not like he’s got a score to settle with The Church, or like he’s still working his own crap out, but like he simply can’t believe.

While these themes can be seen playing out in his Spaghetti Westerns, Dirty Harry series, and a variety of other places, perhaps they are nowhere more clear than in Unforgiven (the name says it all), Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. In all three, Christianity is reduced to having a place among women and children, but not in the violent world of men. Here faith offers no real solutions and no real help. In Unforgiven, the main character explains away his change of behavior and church attendance as something he did for his (now late) wife, returning un-changed to his life of killing when he deems it necessary. Mystic River is more open with its questioning of the church, with Sean Penn taking his daughters to first communion at the beginning of the film, and the Catholic Church figuring heavily throughout. But in the end, Penn kills an innocent man, one of his best friends from childhood, and seemingly has no remorse. His wife’s words of consolation, that he had to do what he had to do to take care of his own, stand in glaring contrast to the giant cross on his back during their conversation. In Million Dollar Baby the dialogue with the church is most blatant, seen in the ongoing conversation between Clint’s character, a hardened old boxing trainer, and his priest. Clint primarily shows up for services to banter back-and-forth with the young father. In the end, he disregards the church’s teachings on life and assisted suicide and pulls the plug with no remorse on a fighter kept alive by life-support systems.

In light of these and other films, nothing could have surprised me more than Gran Torino. Torino alludes to two of these three films, Unforgiven’s “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man” speech (one of my favorite quotes from contemporary film), and Million Dollar Baby’s argumentative relationship with a young priest. Initially I was turned off, thinking we were seeing a retread of those films. I shouldn’t have worried. While the themes explored are similar, the conclusions he reaches are completely different. In Torino, the young priest sticks to his guns and puts his life on the line for Eastwood’s Frank, instead of being reduced to blasphemous cursing, as he does in Baby. Confronted with a similar situation to Unforgiven (in Unforgiven a prostitute is cut-up and gang-raped by outlaws, in Torino Frank’s neighbor is badly beat-up and gang-raped by outlaws). But this time, instead of killing everyone, Frank alludes to his Unforgiven speech, but allows himself to be cut down, in so doing ending the cycle of violence that he helped to start and bringing a measure of peace to his neighbors. As he falls, he has a religious icon in one hand, and he falls into the crucifix pose on the ground. Redemption in death and the Christ-figure have finally come to Eastwood at 78.

Does that mean that faith has come to Eastwood? Not necessarily, but the shift is a significant one in one of our significant directors who, like him or hate him, has always had something to say and has been surprisingly consistent on his worldview over the last thirty years. It makes me wonder if the dialogue with the Church in Eastwood’s films, which I always assumed served only as a foil, was more indicative of where he saw himself—in a Hegelian dialectic that may finally have reached a synthesis.