‘Why can’t people mind their own business? Idiots…’
People love a story about a grumpy old bastard learning the error of their ways. Obviously, A Christmas Carol is the most prominent example but we also have It’s a Wonderful Life, Ikiru, Up and many others. A Man Called Otto is the latest example of this phenomenon and it’s a good one too…
The eponymous protagonist Otto (Tom Hanks) has decided it’s time to kill himself. Laid off from work and missing his dead wife, Otto’s hatred of modern life runs deep and it is only the intervention of a new family moving into the neighbourhood that postpones his quest to end it all. Mariana Treviño and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo play the inspirational couple that change Otto’s life with Mike Birbiglia and Cameron Britton providing able support as a real estate agent and overly friendly neighbour respectively.
I’ll address the main issue with the film before we get into the good stuff. While Hanks is typically sensational in the second half of the movie, his everyman charm ensures that he is not particularly convincing when he has to be mean and nasty. He can’t lose the twinkle in his eye or the ghost of a smile on his lips, and this probably explains why Hanks has never really been called upon to play a villain before. That being said, David Magee’s screenplay (adapted from the Swedish film A Man Called Ove released in 2015) is warm and funny and touching in all the right places without being too sentimental and saccharine. The film is predictable, however, but I found this adherence to convention to be comforting rather than harmful – like pulling on an old jumper.
A Man Called Otto takes no risks and offers nothing new to the world of cinema. But it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you just want to watch a grumpy old bastard learn a few lessons of a Sunday afternoon. Not every film can be arty or esoteric (thank God). Sometimes a crowd-pleaser is what is required. This film is a crowd-pleaser.
