A MAN CALLED OTTO: A Grumpy Old Hanks In The Maybe-See Feel-Okay Film Of The Season

Now playing at a bunch of multi-plexes in my neck of the woods:

A MAN CALLED OTTO (Dir. Marc Forster, 2022)

Ah, Tom Hanks. America’s Dad. The modern day Jimmy Stewart. You know the deal - he’s the double Oscar-winning everyman of cinema that’s been on the pop culture radar for four decades, who I’ve never met anyone who disliked. His stock hasn’t even fallen in the last year with his badly reviewed, very odd, and frankly off role as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrman’s ELVIS, or his instantly forgettable performance as Gepetto in Robert Zemeckis’ PINOCCHIO the last year (I even considered a post entitled “Has Covid Thrown Tom Hanks off his game”), because the goodwill embedded in his rich legacy can’t easily be erased with a few missteps.

So here is Hanks in a classic, meaning frankly standard, grumpy old man role (somebody even calls him a grumpy old bastard in the first five minutes) as widowed Pittsburgh resident, Otto Anderson, in this remake of Hannes Holm’s 2015 Swedish comedy drama, A MAN CALLED OVE. Just like Rolf Lassgård in the original, we meet Otto in a box store having issues with staff, but he’s buying rope, not the flowers that Ove grumbled about the discount price of when buying for his wife’s grave.

The rope Otto is purchasing is to hang himself, which brings us this story’s central premise – a man’s suicide attempts keep getting aborted by life re-affirming interruptions. These distractions from Otto’s rush to join his spouse in the afterlife come in the form of a new family that has moved in to his small, contained suburban housing community. The out-going, bubbly, and pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño), and her friendly doofus husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and their two kids ( Christiana Montoy, and Alessandra Perez) have moved into a unit across from Otto’s home, and they immediately are in need of his help with home repairs.

The community surrounding Otto, and his new neighbors includes the kindly Anita (Juanita Jennings), and her dementia-suffering husband Reuben (Peter Lawson Jones), who a younger Otto (played in flashbacks by Hanks’ 27-year old son, Truman) had a long-running Ford vs. Chevy rivalry over automobile purchases (it was Saab vs. Volvo in the Swedish version); the overly chipper Jimmy (Cameron Britton), and transgender delivery boy Malcolm (Mack Bayda), who was a former student of Otto’s wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller). That last cast member may sound like a woke addition, and it pretty much is as David Magee’s adapted screenplay changes the character from just being gay in OVE).

As for those aforementioned flashbacks, they are emotionally summoned when Otto is closest to death, whether it be by rope, his Chevy’s exhaust, getting hit by a train, or with a rifle, and they dive deep into sometimes icky, but still earnestly poignant enough, sentiment especially when Otto and Sonya’s first meeting is enhanced to be even more of a meet cute than in the original with Truman Hank’s Otto getting on a commuter train heading the opposite direction that he was going to return a book that the young lady dropped on the platform (He just happens to wakes up on in the train compartment with her there in OVE).

Then there are the strands of Mike Birbiglia (SLEEPWALK WITH ME) as an adversarial dickhead real estate agent (from a evil company actually called Dye & Merica), and another concession to today’s internet fame culture with a social media journalist played by Kelly Lamor Wilson, who aims to make Otto an online hero. Yeah, this stuff is pretty forced, dopey, and sitcom-ish, but somehow felt like it had just as much right to be there as the more fleshed-out character elements.

While Marc Forster’s (FINDING NEVERLAND, QUANTUM OF SOLACE) direction is stylishly unspectacular, there is a decent amount of real charm, and warm sensibility (especially in Hanks’ moments with the scene-stealing Treviño) in this light opus about the ornery Otto, but it’s still fairly insubstantial Hanks fare in the league of the other A-lister’s little-remembered throwaways like THE TERMINAL, HOLOGRAM, any of those DA VINCI CODE non epics (which even Hanks now calls “hooey”), or especially LARRY CROWNE. Still, A MAN CALLED OTTO is a fine, fluffy watch – a maybe-see, feel-okay view if I must say - that didn’t make me cringe too hard, and that fans of Hanks will most likely enjoy.

Holm’s OVE original, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is a better movie, but only by a small measure as it’s a pretty cornball affair itself. They are interesting to compare as many scenes are close to shot-by-shot recreations, and there’s only a handful of story deviations. It’s telling that OTTO most resonates when it stays faithful to its source material. Consider it the equivalent of an English language cover song by a big name star that’ll just be background music in most people’s lives.

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A MAN CALLED OVE: A Lovely Look At The Life Of A Curmudgeon

Now playing at an indie art house near me:

A MAN CALLED OVE (Dir. Hannes Holm, 2016)

There is a mini genre of movies about old cranky guys whose wives have just died and they have to realize that, with the help of some quirky elements, there are still reasons to still want to be alive. See ABOUT SCHMIDT, GRAN TARINO, and UP for starters.

Add to that short but sweet list writer/director Hannes Holms’s A MAN CALLED OVE, which stars Rolf Lassgård as Ove, a 60-ish widower who lives in a small gated townhouse community in a pretty plain looking suburb of Sweden.

When Ove loses his job of 43 years with the railroad, he decides to take his life so that he can join his wife in the afterlife much sooner. But his attempts to hang himself (with a thin blue nylon rope that you know is just going to break) keep getting interrupted by a family moving in next door.

Ove’s new neighbors consist of the pregnant Iranian refugee Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), her dopey, bearded husband (Tobias Almborg), and their two young daughters (Zozan Akgün and Nelly Jamarani).

Ove’s suicide attempts trigger a series of emotional flashbacks which show us how his parents died at an early age, how he got his job, how he met his wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll), and how, in the most vivid and impactful one, how their life was derailed by a tragic accident.

In between these affecting flashbacks in which Ove is well played by the 30-ish Filip Berg, Parvaneh gets closer to the present day ornery Ove and even has him babysit her kids. Then Ove, who has a heart that’s “too big” as we are told on a hospital visit, takes in a mangy cat, lets a teenager who’s been kicked out of his house for being gay stay at his apartment, and teaches Parveneh how to drive.

However, all through this, Ove daily visits his wife’s grave and tells her he’ll be there as soon as he can.

Based on Fredrik Backman’s 2012 novel, A MAN CALLED OVE is a lovely look at the life of a curmudgeon. It can get a bit cutesy at times, but its humor and plainspoken unpretentiousness grounds the proceedings. I was greatly amused by Lassgård’s Ove who bemoans who he calls the “white shirts” (corporate bureaucrats), and the “idiots” who are pretty much everyone else who gets in his way.

The film serves as a excellent introduction for American audiences (and me) to Lassgård, who’s an award-winning Swedish actor with an impressive resume of film and television work. Holm’s movie itself has deservedly won awards in his home country and is an international hit – it’s also Sweden’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the next Oscars - so don’t let things like subtitles, or weird dislike of foreign films keep you from this charming, uplifting crowd pleaser.

The people who’d pass this up for some lackluster, and uninspiring title at the multiplex are what Ove most mutters under his breath throughout the film: “idiots.”

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