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There have been quite a few marginal film genres that have unexpectedly changed themselves into art. The Western, for instance, which kicked around the trenches of Hollywood for a long time as a reliable but poorly regarded genre, and then, suddenly, grew up, transforming from simplistic morality tales set on horseback to a mature and unblinking look at the mythology of the creation of the United States. Nowadays, if a Western is made, it is almost always treated like an art film with some action scenes, with the unfortunate side-effect that Westerns have started to become ponderous, self-important, and not very much fun to watch.

Clint Eastwood made one of the last really good modern Westerns quite a few years ago, with Unforgiven, and, as a director, he has followed that up with a series of sometimes terrific genre exercises, such as his pair of war films set at Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, with the second film taking the decidedly unusual tact of telling the story from the Japanese point of view. But Westerns and war films long ago crossed over into the realm of art. With Clint Eastwood's latest film, Gran Torino, he tackles a genre that has tended to be occasionally profitably but almost universally despised: the urban revenge narrative.

The plot of Gran Torino is deceptively simple: Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a ragged-voiced Korean war veteran who has watched through his signature squint as his working class ethnic white neighborhood has filled with the urban poor, including a number of Hmong immigrants. Kowalki comes off as a racist -- he cannot mention another ethnicity without resorting to epithets. But Kowalski is a little more complicated than a common bigot. He comes from a an older generation of men for whom tough talking was just the way men spoke to each other, and casually insulting ethnicities was a large part of that tough talk, which was often done with a lot of veiled affection. Every time we see Kowalski with one of his friends, he mocks them for being Italian, or Irish, or whatever is appropriate, and they respond with equally pointed barbs at his Polish heritage. He's not so much a bigot as just an old crank. Sure, Kowalski glowers suspiciously at his Hmong neighbors. But, then, he glowers suspiciously at everybody, especially his own family. Kowalski is a man for whom disapproval is his first impulse, and respect is hard-won.

Nonetheless, Kowalski manages to befriend two neighboring Hmong teens, Sue and Thao, mostly because he sees them bullied and cannot abide a bully. They're friendly, chatty kids, played by Bee Vang and Ahney Her, and, despite Kowalski's natural recalcitrance, they manage to drag him over to their house for a picnic. A large part of the film consists of the culture shock Kowalski experiences in his budding cross-cultural friendship, and these scenes manage to be sweetly comic without ever becoming cloying. Hmong viewers of the film have complained that the film is not a very good introduction to the Hmong experience in America, and I believe their complaints. The neighboring Hmong are seen through Kowalski's bewildered eyes throughout the film, and so much of their cultural behavior goes unexplained. But if Eastwood the actor never really gets to know that much about the Hmong, Eastwood the director nonetheless attempts to be respectful in his presentation of the Hmong. whatever errors he may have made in representing them as a group, he is very careful about presenting them as characters -- and Sue and Thao are fully developed characters, with their own idiosyncrasies, and Eastwood should be commended for that.

Sua and Thao have their own problems as well, mostly in the form of a cousin, Spider, who heads up a small but determined street gang. The gang repeatedly tries to bully Thao into joining them, and Kowalski rather impulsively rushes to defend him, setting up a depressingly believable series of escalations. And this is where the revenge narrative takes over. The street gang eventually does something so reprehensible that revenge is demanded, and we're now in the territory of other urban vengeance stories, such as Charles Bronson's Death Wish films, in which a lone white man goes to war with the street thugs who have crossed him. These films have tended toward grotesque fantasies of disempowerment, where white males have become minorities in an increasingly criminal city of ruthless minorities and ineffectual cops. Pushed too far, these white men turn to sadistic acts of violence to level the playing field. There is something poisonous about this fantasy, and, although they proved popular enough to inspire a half-dozen Death Wish films and hundreds of imitators, critics tended to recognize that the films dramatized some of our worst impulses as human -- our tendency to resort to small, suspicious ethnic and racial tribes who take pleasure from acting out brazen acts of public violence on each other.

And, for much of the film, this is where Gran Torino seems headed. Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski has a lot in common with the heroes of past revenge fantasies, and, in fact, given his suspicious nature and ease with threats of violence, he seems simply to be an older, meaner version of them. And, despite the film's gentle sense of humor and the care it takes in observing Kowalski's unlikely friendship with his Hmong neighbors, had the film ended in a simple act of vengeful bloodletting, it wouldn't be much better that the violent fantasies that preceded it. But Eastwood, and screenwriter Nick Schenk, have another ending in mind, and while it involves the same sort of bloody standoff from behind the sites of guns that typified the Death Wish films, this ending is more complicated, and more heartbreaking, than anything that Charles Bronson was ever given. And this is where Eastwood does something entirely unexpected -- he makes the genre something more than just a savage fantasy of racially tinged street warfare and something much closer to art.