Gran Torino: Why we care about the Grumpy Old Man
December 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Gran Torino is another movie that has been on my list for a long time. The film is about a crusty Korean War veteran who grudgingly befriends his Asian refugee neighbors and later protects them from a local street gang. It’s a character-driven movie that asks the audience to care about the characters and their relationships.
Getting the audience to care about on-screen characters is one of the biggest challenges of filmmaking, and it’s an area that young filmmakers often struggle with. By comparison, getting your low budget film to “look” like a Hollywood movie is relatively easy.
Whether or not the audience cares about a character will depend on how the filmmaker utilizes sympathy and/or empathy. Sympathy is what the audience feels toward a character who is virtuous, a victim, an underdog in his given situation, or very young or old. Sympathy is that thing you feel when you see a “sad” situation and know you should feel “sad” about it. It’s the thing that makes you say, “Awww…” when you see a cute puppy.
Empathy is what you feel when you actually understand what the other person (or character) is feeling. For example, if the on-screen character experiences the death of a beloved pet and you have also experienced the death of a pet, then you will feel empathy toward the character. Empathy is stronger than sympathy, because it allows us to relate on a deeper level as human beings. In the hands of a skilled storyteller, audiences can be made to feel empathy even for criminals.
Let’s see how this relates to the film. Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is gruff, bitter, and crude. He wants everyone in the world to know that he hates their guts and doesn’t want anything to do with them, including his own family. Just based on this description, it is hard to imagine how the audience would care about this character for even five minutes, much less two hours. But the filmmakers use sympathy and empathy to win us over.
First, Kowalski is old. His wife just died, and his two sons want to stick him in a retirement home. His granddaughter just wants to make sure she gets his couch when he dies. Kowalski lives on a run-down street in a run-down neighborhood, and his neighborhood is being taken over by immigrant families, many who don’t speak English, and some who are openly rude to him. While he doesn’t get along with other humans, he clearly loves his dog (aww…) and has a few conversations with her. All of these factors are designed to help us see past Kowalski’s hard shell and at least give him a chance to grow on us.
The filmmakers also force Kowalski to interact with his two young neighbors. One, a feisty teenage Asian girl, constantly laughs at Kowalski’s rude behavior, regardless of what he says. This helps the audience to laugh, which is key to getting us to like him. After all, if this young girl doesn’t feel threatened by him, then we shouldn’t either. When a gang starts a fight in his front yard, Kowalski chases them off with a rifle. Even though he is acting in his own self interest at first, he has essentially rescued his neighbors and is treated as a hero by the neighborhood. In this manner, through his actions, the audience begins to understand what Kowalski cares about, and in turn the audience cares about him.
Kowalski would fall under the character archetype of “The Grumpy Old Man.” There are countless examples of this archetype in movies. The first example that comes to mind is the old man in Pixar’s Up. Another related character would be Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. The important thing to understand is that characters don’t have to be angels in order for us to like them. They just have to be presented to us in the right way. Sympathy and empathy are the tools to make this happen.
