Mark Reviews Movies: A MAN CALLED OTTO

A Man Called Otto, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 29, 2022

In A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks puts on a gruff voice and a grumpy demeanor to play a man with a secretly big and not-so-secretly broken heart. This is the sort of performance that Hanks could pull off with little effort, but then again, isn't the distinguishing characteristic of a great actor to make a transformation appear effortless? It's sometimes too easy to take our most effective actors and stars for granted.

The point is that Hanks is quite good here—naturally amusing, drolly charming even at his character's grumpiest, filled with a real sense of despair that drives this man, pulling off the sort of turnaround that might otherwise come across as schmaltzy, unbelievable, or both. Each of those things takes a certain kind of skill, but here's Hanks doing them all with seemingly relative ease. We definitely shouldn't take that for granted.

The actor plays Otto, naturally, a lonely man living lonely life of routine and isolation. A lot of this character's back story is kept something of a mystery, although none of the revelations are exactly earth-shattering. Some will know them because the film, directed by Marc Forster, is a remake of the 2015 film A Man Called Ove from Sweden, and fewer, perhaps, will know the details because both versions are also based on the novel by Fredrik Backman. Most will have Otto's bittersweet past figured out without knowledge of either piece of source material, because David Magee's screenplay isn't exactly re-inventing much of anything, regardless of the material's origin.

That's not to say the story should be dismissed, though. It's quite dark at the start—throughout, really, even if the softening of those initially hard edges is inherently manipulative—and even more so because matters first appear so mundane and ordinary.

Otto heads out to a hardware store and gets into some arguments with young, unprepared employees about cutting a length of rope and having to pay by the yard instead of the foot. On a regular day, he gets dressed, pockets a particular coin, and walks the gated neighborhood of townhouses he calls home, looking for any kind of parking violation, errant piece of recycling, or neighbor whose thoughtless or cheerful ways grate on his nerves. On this particular day, he heads into work, as he has done for decades, only to be greeted by a party of co-workers wishing him farewell after a semi-forced retirement.

That's it. With nothing left to do with his life, Otto has decided to end it.

Just as he's about to put the rope he purchased to use, though, he spots some new neighbors, moving in and making a hazard out of the trailer they're towing. Otto is too stubborn a person to let something like his planned death get in the way of making sure people are following the rules.

This is a pretty demented joke, and it's one that more or less becomes a running gag as the story continues. As such, it's probably better to accept the premise in that spirit and as the gimmick for something closer to a fable than any kind of reality. That's a tough order, to be sure, especially considering that the filmmakers are dealing with something as severe as suicide, but Forster and Magee provide just enough distance from that severity to make palatable—for better or for worse, depending on one's perspective.

The real story, anyway, is about how these new neighbors start a change in the way Otto looks at his own life and his potential to connect with other people. The latter is a tall order for the guy, of course, who has spent decades losing friends over petty disagreements (One flashback montage sees him quietly ending a friendship over makes of automobiles) and making enemies over his hardline stance on the rules. Marisol (Mariana Treviño), a pregnant mother of two daughters and the wife of a helpless husband (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), knows nothing about Otto, except that he helps her family to park that trailer when he didn't need to. As other issues around the home arise, Marisol comes asking Otto for help—sometimes when he's in the process of trying to end his life again.

That's one side of this story, as Otto starts connecting or re-connecting with his neighbors and the tough and irritable exterior put on by Hanks chips away. It's a pleasant little tale, despite the troubling undercurrent of Otto's suicidal feelings (as well as the way the story inherently simplifies the notion of a "fix" for those feelings), and Treviño is a chipper but assertive presence in a role that does suggest the character has more to her than serving as a cure for Otto's bad mood.

The other side of the story explains how Otto arrived at this place. The early happiness of his youth (The younger Otto is played by Truman Hanks, and yes, he's the star's son) and a joyful courtship/marriage to his wife (played by Rachel Keller) turns to tragedy, makes Otto angrier, and ultimately leaves him a grieving widower. There are more specifics, of course, but those flashbacks, as well as Otto's growing willingness to reveal those details to Marisol, do the job they're supposed to do.

A similar sentiment could be aimed at the film in general. A Man Called Otto is a somewhat familiar story, even outside of its existence as a remake, but the dark humor, sincere optimism, and Hanks' performance ensure that the film accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

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