Just like the kids seemed like real kids, I think Walt seemed like a very real person. We aren't really used to heroes in movies being like this.
Abso-freakin-lutely. And it's because they really don't fit "hero" mold. The two sides of the character muddy and spoil each other, taking the strength out of either sides heroic action. Seems to me. So it's a tough storyline to sell.
For me, these contrasts made his character all the more real. When he talked to the girl in the basement that Toad likes I started cringing in advance because it felt like you just couldn't know "which" Walt was going to come out. We've probably all got relatives like this–you don't know what the hell they're going to say in social situations.
Yeah, that was an interesting sequence. When it started, with Walt agreeing to go visit the zipperhead household, I was like "Whut?!", and all the way through it I was looking for signs of what the hell was going on in Walt's psyche... that actually was fascinating at least in part because it took a little while to get my head around the fact that actually Walt was pretty damn drunk!
(This is why we see him lying on his back, arms out and blood on his hands like stigmata; he's Christ dying for the sins of everyone else...this symbolism was a little over the top.)
Does his dying solve all of the problems in the world? No. Nothing can undo or make better Sue being raped.
That was really very hard to take, you know? Thematically, and as a story that people watch and sort of might learn lessons from, there was next to nothing in anyone's responses in that movie that paid real, true, suitable attention to Sue.
That's kind of it, really. Walt being as he was represented pretty much undermined everything good in his own action (and thus in the story's sorta-heroic theme) not so much by being a crappy man, but by being inadequate to the stuff that went on around him.
And that wasn't what the movie told us. I didn't tell us Walt was inadequate as a heroic themed man. I guess it told us he was a man (with one or two big ideas) and that's it.
Which is freaky in a film because we want to pin something bigger to the hero, I think.
So I can't work out if Gran Torino was High Plains Drifter in the suburbs or just the suburbs.
See, where in the hell did Walt get the idea to finish out that way? How did he figure it out? Why? Where did it come from? Maybe I just haven't met people like that so I don't know, or maybe the movie didn't present it right. Dunno. Maybe I'll have to try watching it again.