Summary
The day after his confrontation with Thao, Walt is installing steel mesh over his garage windows. His son calls to ask if he still knows a guy who has season tickets to a football team’s games. Walt hangs up. That evening Walt drinks several Pabst beers on his porch while looking at his mint-condition car in the driveway. That night, Spider and his friends arrive to hassle Sue and Thao again. They are on the porch. They take Thao away. The tussle causes Thao’s family to come outside and everyone wrestles against each other. Suddenly Walt is there with his shotgun aimed at the gangsters. He tells them to get off his lawn, where a gnome has broken.
The gangsters tell him to go back inside. Walt says, “We used to stack fucks like you five feet high in Korea, use you for sandbags.” The gangsters leave but tell him he better watch his back. Thao’s sister thanks Walt; he tells them to get off his lawn. The next day Walt opens his door to see his porch covered in offerings of flowers and food and wrapped gifts from his neighbors and people in the neighborhood. Walt doesn’t like the attention. Sue introduces herself, Thao, and their mother. She says he is a hero to the neighborhood for saving Thao. Thao then apologizes for trying to steal the Gran Torino. Walt threatens to kill Thao if he steps on Walt’s property again.
The priest visits while Walt smokes on his porch. He demands to know why Walt didn’t call the police. “You know, I prayed that someone would show up, but nobody answered,” Walt replies while with a smile. The priest says someone could have died. Walt says that in Korea, when a thousand “screaming gooks came across the line … we reacted.” “We’re not in Korea Mr. Kowalski,” the priest says. He goes on to say confession would do Walt good to unload the burden of being ordered to kill in the war. The priest admits he knows nothing about those things, but knows about forgiveness. Walt says, “The thing that haunts a man most is what he isn’t ordered to do.”
Walt goes to his barber, with whom he casually exchanges abusive language, calling the man “half-Jew” for charging ten dollars for a haircut. The barber says it’s been ten for five years “you hard-nosed Polack son of a bitch.” The barber laughs when Walt leaves. The scene cuts to Sue walking with a white boy. They turn a corner and run into three Black men who harass them. Sue sasses them when they sexualize her, though she is evidently frightened as they push her male friend against a fence. Walt pulls up nearby in his truck. He watches. Sue teases them for using stereotypical sexist language. They start pushing her. Walt drives up and parks. He asks what you “spooks” are up to. They tell him to get his honky ass out of there. Walt gets out, a holstered gun visible. “Ever notice how you come across someone once in a while that you shouldn’t have fucked with?” he asks the Black men. He spits on the ground and says, “That’s me.” Walt reaches into his jacket and points his finger as a pretend gun. Then he pulls his real gun. He tells Sue to get in the truck. He tells the white guy that he doesn’t blame the Black men for not wanting to be his “bro.” He makes him run off. Then he drives Sue away.
In the car, he says, “I thought you Asian girls were supposed to be smart.” He asks what she was doing in the neighborhood. Walt tells her she should be hanging out with her own people, other 'Huh-mongs,' pronouncing the H, not Trey (the white guy). She asks if he means Hmong (silent H). She tells him Hmong people come from different parts of Vietnam, Laos, China, and Thailand. They’re not a place, they’re a people.
Sue says her family came over there because the Hmong fought on the American side in the Vietnam War and so the communists started killing them. He refers to them as jungle people and Sue corrects him, saying they’re hill people. She says the Lutherans brought them to Michigan. Walt says Sue is alright, but says her brother Thao is a dimwit. She says he’s really smart, but in America, Hmong girls go to college and the boys go to jail.
On his porch, Walt says aloud, “That old hag hates my ass,” when he sees the grandmother on her porch. He reads the newspaper to his dog, who pants happily. Across the street, a woman drops a grocery bag. Three kids walk by and laugh at her. Then Thao crosses the street and helps her. Walt says how about that. Then he notices the grandmother having noticed Thao’s good behavior. He swears to himself.
Walt’s son and his son’s wife, Karen, visit to bring Walt a birthday cake and extended grabber. They tell him he might benefit from moving to a retirement home. He sits scowling as he glances at the brochures. His face grows increasingly angry. The scene cuts to his son and his son’s wife rushing out and getting in their car, complaining about Walt kicking them out. Later on the porch, Walt looks at a photo of his wife and tells Daisy, his dog, that he misses her. Sue comes by and invites Walt to their barbecue. “Just keep your hands off my dog,” he says. Sue replies: “No worries, we only eat cats.” “Really?” Walt says. “No,” she says playfully, “I’m kidding, moron.” She insists he join. He realizes he has run out of beer, so he goes next door.
The house is full of Hmong people. He gets a beer from the fridge. The grandmother shouts in her language when she sees him. Sue admits the old woman hates him. Walt offends people when he touches a small girl’s head. Sue informs him that Hmong people believe the soul resides on the head, so you don’t touch people there. She also explains that people keep looking away because it’s impolite to make eye contact. Sue introduces him to the shaman, a short man in an elaborately embroiled tunic outfit. He gives a “reading” of Walt, which Sue translates.
The shaman says that no one likes Walt, his food has no flavor, he made a mistake in his past life Walt is not satisfied with, he has no happiness in his life and is not at peace. Walt grumbles and gets up. He coughs a small amount of blood onto his hand. Sue notices. He runs up to the bathroom to splash water on his face. In the mirror, he says, “I’ve got more in common with these gooks than I do my own rotten family. Happy birthday.”
Analysis
The theme of self-reliance enters the story again as Walt declines to let anyone know about the break-in. When his son calls, Walt is busy fortifying his garage, but Walt neglects to mention that anything has happened. Walt’s poor relationship with his son is further on display when his son reveals that the only reason he called was to ask for Walt’s connection to a man who has football game tickets the son wants. Walt hangs up, showing no sympathy or affection for his son.
In a defiant display, Walt takes the Gran Torino out of the garage that night and proudly admires it in his driveway. It seems he is baiting Thao into trying to steal it again. However, that night Thao resists the gang’s intimidation. The struggle arouses Walt’s attention and, just as he defended his own property with the garage, Walt points his gun and orders the gangsters off his lawn. Walt threatens the gangsters by likening them to the Korean men he killed during the war and stacked up like “sandbags.”
Walt’s display of violence succeeds in getting the gangsters to leave, although they put on their own masculine show by taunting him even as they leave, as though they are not afraid for their lives. While Sue interprets Walt as having come out to protect Thao, he treats her and Thao as though they are no different than the gangsters, sternly telling them to get off his lawn as well.
In an instance of situational irony, Walt wakes up the next day to discover that he has become a hero to the Hmong community in the neighborhood. News of him saving Thao from the gang has spread, the community is showing its thanks by dropping off plants, gifts, and food on Walt’s porch. He finds the attention they are lavishing to be irritating, and repeats his threatening language to Thao, who has admitted to his sister and mother that he tried to steal Walt’s Gran Torino. With this unexpected turn of events, Eastwood introduces the theme of the importance of community, which Walt—at least so far—rejects.
In the following scenes, Walt continues to put his masculinity and self-reliance on display as he teases the priest for trying to get him to go to confession and exchanges casually abusive language with his barber. However, Walt can’t help but intervene when he sees Sue being harassed by three men on a street corner. Walt flashes his holstered gun and then draws it on the men, taking Sue with him. The tension dissolves during his conversation with Sue in the truck. Walt discovers she can play along with his abusive manner of speaking by hitting back with her own insults and sarcasm. At the same time, Sue corrects Walt’s ignorant ideas about the Hmong, explaining the true origins of the Hmong community in his midst, making it clear that they moved to the US in large part because of their support for the US during the Vietnam War.
Walt’s connection with Sue, the Vang Lors, and the Hmong community deepens when he attends a barbecue at the Vang Lor house. His awkwardness is evident in the stiff way he stands, being the only white person in an environment where people are speaking Hmong and eating food unfamiliar to him. Walt’s discomfort increases when he accidentally commits a faux pas by touching a child’s head and then is given a pessimistic reading by the shaman. Walt suddenly coughs blood, a fact he attempts to hide from Sue by running to the bathroom. In a moment of situational irony, he looks in the mirror and realizes that he has more in common with the Hmong than he does his own family—a statement that, at this point in the film, remains cryptic.
