A Man Called Otto

A Man Called Otto is red meat to Tom Hanks naysayers. Those who would have you think that his films are good for nothing but a sticky wade through a pool of saccharine sludge will be sharpening their knives and drooling on their whetstones at the prospect of being proved right. For the record, they would be wrong. The problem, however, is that Marc Forster’s English language remake of A Man Called Ove, itself an adaptation of Frederick Backman’s novel of the same name, fans the flames of this perspective when it really didn’t need to.

Fairly religiously following Hannes Holm’s 2015 adaptation of Backman’s novel, Forster’s movie finds Hanks flexing the cantankerous portion of his acting capabilities as the titular Otto, a suicidally depressed man of advanced middle age whose attempts at following through on the mortal sin are rudely stymied by unruly interruptions to the orderly adherence of the customs of his new-build community. Are these purely coincidental interruptions that get in the way of the job being done, or are they manifestations of Otto’s life instinct? No life-changing prizes for guessing which one bends his arc. These communal customs are enforced by Otto with not so much a fist of iron but a fist of nettles. Truly, he means nobody harm but himself, and there is, of course, a heart of gigantic proportions waiting to melt the ice which layers it. It begins, slowly at first, to thaw on the arrival of his new neighbours, Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his pregnant wife, Marisol (Mariana Treviño).

Treviño’s performance is lovingly spritely, and the balance that she provides to Hanks’ performance of grunts and groans is at the heart of the film’s comedic tension, although this dynamic can feel a little obviously constructed and lacking the nuance it needs to be truly interesting. Obvious is perhaps the keyword in all of this, partly because it’s a story we’re intimately familiar with (the grumpy but redeemable old man is a rather hackneyed trope at this stage) but also because we know that Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks: as the safe face of American values, he must be redeemed.

That is not to say, however, that a slightly braver directorial hand couldn’t have helped the film transcend above these expectations, even if the momentum of the narrative ends up where it should. It seems like a squandered open goal to be handed a story about a man whose suicide attempts are always rudely interrupted by one thing or another, only to have it flattened by an all too genial tone. There are interesting directorial flourishes from Forster, notably in the flashbacks which, while seeking to round out Otto’s backstory, feed with uncharacteristic subtlety into the present timeline.

There is arguably comfort, however, in the predictability of the story and of the filmmaking. This, and the feature’s uneven tone could be more passionately forgiven, however, if the shackles were let loose a little more, while the casting of Hanks, although he holds his own as a curmudgeon, signposts the film’s somewhat disheartening lack of audacity.

Matthew McMillan

A Man Called Otto is released nationwide on 6^th January 2023.

Watch the trailer for A Man Called Otto here: