The Grand Torino is the story of an older man and his interactions with his new neighbors in the Detroit suburbs. The main character is a stereotypically grumpy old widower, and the new family that moves in near him is a family of Hmong immigrants; minority immigrants from Asia. The community is tight-knit, and very cloistered. Within the movie, there is conflict between a gang of young Hmong adults and the immigrants that have moved in next to the main character; slowly, the main character begins to win the trust of the Hmong community for chasing off the gangs, even after one of their own tried to steal the main character’s car.
The main character of the movie demonstrates withdrawal from society at the beginning of the film, feeling isolated from the rest of humanity. Indeed, for the majority of the beginning of the film, the main character is alone. He is recently widowed, and feels no real connection to those around him. The fact that his neighbors are Hmong merely serves to isolate him from them further. However, as the movie progresses on, the main character begins to build back some of his feeling of human identity, or human connectivity; he begins to socially connect with those around him, eventually sacrificing his life for the Hmong community that he so reviled at the beginning of the film. According to Adler, the rekindling of this social interest is fundamentally important for living a healthy psychological life; without social interest, the individual leads a deprived and separate life, devoid of creative meaning.
Works cited
Adler, Ronald B, Lawrence B Rosenfeld and Russell F Proctor. Interplay. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
