“Gran Torino” the 2008 movie which I’m inspired by for this new weekly theme, directed and mainly interpreted by a great actor whom everybody likes: Clint Eastwood in the role of a Polish veteran and widower back from the war in Corea, who loves and misses his wife so much and on the contrary is hardened toward any other human being. One thing only succeeds in softening tough Walt Kowalski, one thing he addresses all his affection to, though the war experience. The war can psycho-emotionally kill the ‘lucky’ ones who go back home with nothing missing in their bodies or, at best, changes them and their life radically: thus theurs lives will be different, difensive, distant, not easily comprehensible for those who never saw the war atrocities, never killed anyone or sat by and watched other people dying unfairly. There’s just one thing, as I was saying, that Walt deeply loves and takes care of as if it was his daugther: his Ford Gran Torino. Walt is ill-tempered with the world – with a young priest too whi, nevertheless, intuits thta Walt suffers from a torment inside him and an unsolved sense of guilt – including his neighbours, who are right away devoted to him, and show it by giving him infinite culinary gifts, after he reacts to a local criminal band that bothers the two children of the same Asiatic family. Walt helps, always with his manner, young Thao to find his place in life and grow up and protects him from the bad guys of the area and, when Thao’s sister is brutally assaulted by the band, he comes to an act of extraordinary bravery thanks to which, as he predicted, the offenders will be brought to justice. If these are not facts.. As a consequence, my lesson is that people must be known beyond their facade, because their substance is what really counts not the beautiful words ending in themselves nor, as Pirandello said, the masks we encounter during our life. Therefore, I abhor and condemn any sketchy attitude as well as the laziness and gradual decline of many relationships and, on top of anything else, today’s growing superficiality of many lives. Let’s give value to the Mr. Walts we are surrounded by and look for those we yet don’t know!
