At the Movies
“Gran Torino” and “Valkyrie”: Mismatched Heroes of the Big Screen

– By Mitch Silver –

For such dissimilar movies, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” and Tom Cruise’s “Valkyrie” are really two peas in a pod. They’re both variations on a single theme: the hero who selflessly confronts evil in the world.

Eastwood’s hero, Walt Kowalski, may not seem like one when the picture opens. Instead, he’s a bile-spewing old man who’s either sitting on the front porch of his changing blue-collar Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, religiously mowing the grass (about the only religious thing about him) or waxing the 1972 Ford Gran Torino in his driveway. Pretty soon, though, he’s moved to take up arms against the Hmong youth gang terrorizing his neighbors.

Tom Cruise’s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg is a more conventional role model, the decorated soldier who’s lost an eye and a hand in battle and decides to take down the ultimate bad guy, Adolf Hitler.

The success of “Gran Torino” and the failure of “Valkyrie” begin and end with the casting of their central figures. While there is nothing about Cruise to suggest a patrician Prussian officer capable of inspiring German dissidents to rise up against the Fürher, “Gran Torino” would not exist without Eastwood in the main role. He tells a young thug, “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me.” You know he means it. And not just because he once played a character called Dirty Harry, but because he lives a character called Clint Eastwood.

There’s nothing especially wrong with “Valkyrie”. The history is mostly correct, the planes and tanks and uniforms are right, and the producers emptied England of most of its better character actors to play the Germans: Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp and Tom Wilkinson, to name a few. It’s just that I can think of twenty actors more convincing as Stauffenberg: Ralph Fiennes, Clive Owen … hell, Daniel Craig would be better. The one bravura performance in the whole picture comes from David Bamber, a veteran British TV actor whose skimpy movie credits include Consulate Clerk in “The Bourne Identity” and Passenger on Omnibus in “The Gangs of New York”. His Führer is tired, suspicious and vindictive, just the way we remember him.

Where “Valkyrie” is chock-full of veteran actors chewing the scenery, “Gran Torino” has a cast of unknowns. Bee Vang plays the teenager Thao Vang Lor, who is hazed into trying to steal Eastwood’s Gran Torino by the neighborhood gang. Ahney Her is his older sister, Sue, a tough kid who tries to protect him.

Eventually Eastwood will have to protect them both. The one familiar actor other than Eastwood is John Carroll Lynch, Frances McDormand’s duck-stamp-designing husband, Norm Gunderson, in “Fargo”. Here he plays Eastwood’s equally old-school barber, and together they initiate their young immigrant neighbor in “how to talk like a man” in one of the movie’s funnier moments.

What makes “Gran Torino” work is the clash of cultures. Walt Kowalski is dying, right along with the Anglo hold on his neighborhood. The people next door, especially the Cambodian Grandma, are just waiting for him to leave, on his own or on a gurney, they don’t care which. And Walt returns the sentiment. From his point of view, they speak funny and eat funny food. Only when they mutually discover that the enemy of my enemy is my friend does the movie take off to its stunning conclusion.

On the other hand, “Valkyrie” is filled with people who wear the same uniforms and mostly think the same thoughts — that Germany is losing the war and Hitler must go. The difference is Stauffenberg is the one with the courage to say it out loud. Unlike the writer Christopher McQuarrie’s biggest success, “The Usual Suspects”, the dialogue doesn’t contain a single memorable line. Bryan Singer, who helmed “Suspects” and the interesting “Apt Pupil” about a Nazi war criminal who’s outed while living here in the States, directs this picture like he’s doing “X-Men”. There are satisfactory troop strafings, bomb detonations and deaths by firing squad, but even Colonel Stauffenberg’s wife seems to go along with the ill-fated plot without a peep.

Full disclosure: when I worked at J. Walter Thompson Advertising in the early 1970s, I wrote commercials for the Gran Torino. Maybe that’s why I like the movie so much more.