I was impressed. I felt it was a really good film, and then once the engagement with the story ended, I had to think of what it all meant. It occurred to me that Walt, the main hero in the film, a polish origin Korean War vet, was the face of 2008 Appalachian voters who swung for Obama. A member of the elusive group that some in the media described as "racists for Obama." When I was done with that thought, and with the mental footnote that the film was not really set in Appalachia but rather in the Detroit suburbs, I realized that for all the flaws of this story of Catholic redemption through self-sacrifice, GRan Torino is above all an eloquent answer to Spike Lee's complaints about Eastwood and his lack of engagement with the issue of race. If any film engages with issues of race, the Gran Torino is that. You can decide that you like it or not but in the end this film about white working-class decline in a post industrial world and about the immigrant hope and blight that replaces the traces of a once vibrant but homogenous and culturally sterile middle class life. We become more diverse, culturally richer, but also collectively poorer in this world. Eastwood does not offer solutions. His hero does not resolve the problems of race. He never transcends his prejudices. He just learns to cope with people by living next to them. Eastwood's is not an academic solution. It is not a political correctness imposed on bourgeois students who learn to hide their prejudices under the language of propriety, it is a coping through the forced reality of life. You could argue that the vision simplifies the problems of race, yet in a world where the scared white working class has come to see a black man as its potential savior, the message may have some resonance. Here too, the reality and pain of life forces changes of attitude that academic policing never managed to impose.