A Man Called Otto

A Man Called Otto is a sweet little movie that is too scattered in its characters and plotting to be fully effective.  It's a movie about an old curmudgeon, but since he's played by Tom Hanks, we know he's not what he seems.  We also know this, because the movie frequently supplies nostalgic flashbacks to his sad past set to sentimental pop songs, and the equally sentimental music score by Thomas Newman.

This is a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve, and there are moments here that I liked.  But there are just as many that feel calculated and scripted.  The movie is inspired by the Swedish novel, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, which got its own movie in its native language back in 2015.  Having not read the book or seen the previous film, I can't judge this as an adaptation.  What I can say is this Hollywood film simply jumps around too much from one crowd pleasing element to another.  The movie has a lot of elements that should work, but because it can't narrow its focus, it winds up simply coming across as disorganized.  I liked Otto, and I liked his neighbors, but the movie keeps us at arm's length because it can't decide how it wants to tug at our heartstrings.  

This should be a sweet little movie about a grumpy old man who learns to open his heart again after the passing of his wife, but because the movie can't pick an angle, it tries to do so much more.  It supplies the main character with some boisterous new neighbors with two precocious little daughters (with a third baby on the way, so there can be the inevitable child birth hospital scene), a transgender kid who gets kicked out of his home by his father that Otto bonds with and helps out, a cute little cat that the old man unwillingly becomes the owner of, an evil real estate company that is trying to kick an elderly couple out of their home, and some young social media reporters who view Otto as a hero after he saves someone who fell on the train tracks.  

Various characters and subplots play out through A Man Called Otto, and the movie tries desperately to juggle all of these emotional elements, but it just never stays on anything long enough for us to get attached to them like we should.  All this, and we also have Otto's own sad past concerning his true love, Sonya (Rachel Keller), who he met by chance when he was a young man (played in flashbacks by Hanks' real life son, Truman) and eventually married.  These flashbacks tell us why they never had children, and why he became so shut off to everyone except his wife, and why after she died from cancer, he doesn't want to go on anymore.  It becomes kind of a morbid running gag in the film that Otto wants to kill himself through different means, but keeps on getting interrupted somehow by one of the many other neighbors who keep on showing up at his door like characters in a sitcom. 

These flashbacks are far too scattered and brief for us to truly get lost in the emotion that the movie wants to create.  Think back on Pixar's Up, and how that movie spent its first fifteen or so minutes showing us the love that Carl and Ellie had for each other.  It told us everything we needed to know in the form of an amazing short film hidden within a roughly 90 minute movie.  The approach worked, because that film's director, Pete Docter, let the emotion truly wash over its audience, and told us everything we needed to know all at once.  Here, it feels like director Marc Foster (2018's Christopher Robin) is just hiding information from us until it's dramatically convenient.  He also rips off a key moment from the underrated John Hughes film, 1988's She's Having a Baby, using a similar scene scored to the same song (Kate Bush's This Woman's Work), and only proves that Hughes did it better 35 years ago.

The thing is, I liked the performances here, especially Hanks, who gets to give a real performance without a bizarre accent like his last two films, Elvis and Pinocchio.  I even liked his neighbors, and thought if the movie slowed down long enough for us to get truly attached to them, they could be really something.  A Man Called Otto so desperately wants to warm our hearts and leave us with a tear in our eye, but it can't decide how it wants to do so.  It goes at it from so many angles that I got frustrated.  I hate when that happens.

0 comments