Gran Torino

“Gran Torino” is a film which I thought is based on a true story. The greatest ones teach you a lesson and this has a big one: life teaches you not to be afraid of the difference. This is a piece of advice which I can associate myself with as I live in a town with where 75% of people are foreign. So it turns us (the Spaniards) into foreigners. As it happened in the film, in my town there are several neighbourhoods, one for the Moroccan people and other for the “Europeans” (in this group we can include Chinese people, Russian people,…) which belong to the centre, where live all the Spanish people. However, the differences in race are not rooted as in “Gran Torino”, since we were young we learnt what took Walt Kowalski… months?...years? to learn; maybe we can identify us more with the foreigners than with people who have our blood.

Therefore another interesting point is the sons’ lack of concern or the lack of attention for Walt. Sometimes we forget those people who are the best teachers in life; our parents and grandparents. I would do anything to go back in time and ask my mother’s father about problems which concern me. And what makes me feel sorry for them are that they could not imagine that their father was ill and that they could not spend the last days with him before he died due to a terrible shooting.

Lastly I want to talk about one scene in the film, when Walt’s son and his wife give him some brochures at his birthday in order to take him to a “residence” or “hotel”. Some years ago, I read a book called Tuesdays with Morris which is about an old teacher with sclerosis who is visited by an old student. During these afternoons they talk about life, and it was a question with its corresponding answer which can be applied to the scene mentioned before. It was something like: what would you do if you were able to do whatever you like? And he answered: I would do the same things I did when I was able to walk, like go for a walk, cook,… My neighbour also suffers this illness, and he needs one person by his side due to the lack of balance.

So, my reflexion is that what Walt wanted was not to go to another place like his son expected, but keep doing the same things that made him feel happy and stay with those who would turn into his real family.