By Sandra Hall
A MAN CALLED OTTO ★★★★
(M) 126 minutes
The plot of A Man Called Otto is written in the frown lines indelibly etched between Tom Hanks’ eyebrows. This is a person so chronically grumpy that his eventual re-location to the sunny side of life is guaranteed. Otherwise, there would be no story. But his transformation is clearly going to take quite a while.
Tom Hanks plays the curmudgeonly Otto, whose grumpy reserve is challenged by the arrival of new neighbours.
Every morning, Otto does his rounds of the neighbourhood – railing against sloppy parking, trading insults with the owner of a tiny dog that regularly defecates in front of his house and crankily sorting the recycling bins before returning home to a solitary breakfast.
It’s the sort of role Robert De Niro has been specialising in lately, but Hanks has come up with a few wrinkles of his own. Behind Otto’s bulldog growl is a debilitating melancholy. The best part of his life is no longer worth living. He had the best of it when his beloved wife was alive. Now she isn’t, the only point to his existence is the one-sided conversation he fondly conducts with her memory every morning at her graveside.
Directed by Marc Forster, a director whose versatility has taken him all the way from Finding Neverland to Quantum of Solace, the film is based on Fredrik Backman’s best-selling novel A Man Called Ove, which spawned a popular Swedish adaptation. Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, saw this film and picked up the rights to it and David Magee, Forster’s collaborator on Finding Neverland, has written the screenplay for this English language version, set in the outer suburbs of Pittsburgh.
Otto (Tom Hanks) eventually builds a friendly relationship with his new neighbour Marisol (Mariana Trevino).
Otto’s road to redemption opens up with the arrival of some new neighbours. Things don’t start well. They get his blood up by endangering his fence while trying to park their trailer, but the wife, Marisol (Mariana Trevino), who is Mexican and blessed with an unquenchable optimism, sees him as a challenge. She begins by putting her foot in the door, so she can present him with a dish she’s cooked, and before too long, he’s babysitting her daughters and teaching her to drive.
The film constantly threatens to descend into shameless sentimentality, but somehow it holds the line. Underpinning Hanks’s characterisation is a strong streak of common sense. As well as being sad and cantankerous, Otto has an undeniable sense of right and wrong and the script has him encounter two moral dilemmas where his courage and tenacity put you firmly on his side.
It also intercuts the present with the past, introducing him as a 20-something and giving an insight into his romance with Sonya (Rachel Keller), his wife - the woman who showed a shy, awkward young man how life could be enhanced by using your imagination.
In essence, it’s a wholly predictable film, yet the manner of its telling reveals such a wry and tender regard for Otto and the people who help bring him back to the land of the living, that your initial scepticism doesn’t stand a chance.
A Man Called Otto is released in cinemas on January 1.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.