Tom Hanks shines in new film A Man Called Otto
The American tragicomedy A Man Called Otto, is close to a frame-by-frame, word-for-word remake of the 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove. That’s a compliment, not a criticism.
The American tragicomedy A Man Called Otto is close to a frame-by-frame, word-for-word remake of the 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove.
That’s a compliment, not a criticism. The original, directed by Hannes Holm and starring Rolf Lassgard, is good, and so is this rendition directed by Marc Forster and starring Tom Hanks.
A straightforward reason for the closeness is that SF Studios, the Swedish firm that made the first film, co-produced this one, alongside Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson.
Beyond that, there are times when a story is told so well that it doesn’t need to be fiddled with. This movie is based on the 2012 novel by Swedish writer Fredrik Backman, which was a bestseller in Swedish and then in its English translation.
The script is by David Magee, who worked with the director on Finding Neverland (2004). He was Oscar nominated for that script and also for his adaptation of The Life of Pi (2012).
The main change, naturally, is the story unfolds somewhere in America. Even then, it’s not so different. The film was shot in Pittsburgh and that’s as good a pick as any for the setting. In winter there is snow on the ground.
Otto (Hanks) lives in a gated community. He has a reputation, inside it and outside it, for being a curmudgeon. He’s 60-ish, a widower and has been made redundant from the firm where he worked as an engineer. He spends his morning dealing with the transgressions of all the “idiots” – the word this taciturn man speaks most often – he resides with, such as parking illegally, using the recycling bins incorrectly, letting dogs urinate on the lawn and failing to latch the main gate.
He’s of the same mindset as Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson) in One Foot in the Grave, and this movie shares some similarities with that superb funny-sad BBC sitcom.
He doesn’t think he will have to deal with the idiots for much longer as he plans to kill himself and join his beloved wife, Sonya, on the other side. “My life was black and white before I met her,’’ he says. “She was the colour.”
When we first meet him he is in a hardware store complaining over the cost of the rope he is buying to hang himself. He only needs five feet, on his engineer’s estimation, but the store sells by the yard so he has to pay an extra 33 cents for a foot he doesn’t need. He’s that sort of grump.
His climb up the homemade scaffold is interrupted by the arrival of a noisy family moving in across the road. Marisol (a brilliant Mariana Trevino) is from Mexico via El Salvador. Her husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is American and they have two young daughters and a third child on the way.
Otto assumes he has more idiots to deal with, but he’s not quite right about that. Marisol is a foot-in-the-door sort who speaks her mind. “My father used to smile like that,’’ she tells him. “I’m not smiling,’’ he replies. “Exactly!” she says.
This is the sort of role in which Hanks excels; one where he’s the lead of a strong ensemble cast. My personal favourites are The Green Mile (1999) and The Road to Perdition (2002).
The scene where he is teaching Marisol how to drive and a bloke in a truck behind them honks is spot on, as is the one where Marisol tells Otto that there are other people, other than his dead wife, who matter, if only he will let them in.
It is Otto’s reluctant relationship with Marisol, Tommy and their children, that fills this 126-minute film with gentle laughs and quiet moments of hope.
Yet Otto’s story is deeply sad, as we gradually learn via his memories of himself as a young man. In a bit of risky casting that pays off brilliantly, young Otto is played by Hanks and Wilson’s son Truman Hanks. He has worked in film but only behind the camera.
The director says when he met Truman Hanks: “I felt like I was sitting across from Tom in the late 80s” – and there is indeed a certain Forrest Gump look to the young Otto.
Young Sonya is played by Rachel Keller. She’s a student schoolteacher when she and Otto first meet.
In a nice touch the book she is reading is the same one as in the original: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, in which a cat is an important character, as one becomes in both films.
Sonya is the reader, not Otto, so he may not know the quote from John Donne’s sermon that goes right to the heart of this thoughtful film.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent; a part of the main …” That was in 1624.
Then and now that continent also includes remarkable women like Marisol.
*******
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (M)
Netflix
Three and a half stars
Who is Benoit Blanc, the semi-flappable private investigator asked to solve the murder mysteries in the Knives Out movies written and directed by Rian Johnson?
The man himself is a bit of a puzzle. As he says in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, “I’m not Batman”. Nor is he James Bond, despite the fact he’s played by Daniel Craig.
He’s what might have happened if Hercule Poirot had been born in the American south.
He speaks in a “Kentucky Fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl”, as Chris Evans put it in the first instalment, Knives Out (2019). Like Poirot, he knows he has the biggest brain in the room.
He tries, not always successfully, to keep that quiet.
“My mind is a fuelled up racing car,’’ he says when he’s in Covid lockdown, “and I got nowhere to drive it.”
We do learn a bit more about him in this sequel, the second in a proposed series. We meet his love interest, for example. I will not say who it is. I will say that Hugh Grant has a cameo role, as do Serena Williams and Angela Lansbury.
Like another of Agatha Christie’s creations, The Mousetrap, it would be a criminal offence to reveal anything but the bare plot. So here’s the set-up. A tech billionaire, Miles Bron (the ever excellent Edward Norton), has invited his four closest friends to his estate on a private Greek island. The friends are supermodel turned fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), men’s rights influencer Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jnr), who is working on a hydrogen-based fuel at Bron’s firm.
Also there – though perhaps not at Bron’s invitation – are his ex-business partner Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monae) and Blanc.
Well, that’s what we see on the surface. This is a story full of assumed and mistaken identities.
The support cast is terrific, especially Bautista as the muscled-up, tattooed campaigner against the “breastification of America”.
He takes a handgun everywhere, even into the swimming pool.
That means there’s a loaded gun at the mansion, which Bron calls Glass Onion in homage to a bar of the same name where the friends used to meet. There’s also alcoholic kombuchas shipped in by Jay Leno, which any sane person will see as a potential murder weapon.
Bron’s the sort of billionaire who has the Mona Lisa in his living room. The French were short of money during Covid, he explains. He tells his friends they are to play a murder mystery game, in which he will be the victim.
The question is whether there will be a real murder or murders in the building. As this is a 139-minute movie, we don’t need Sherlock Holmes to deduce the answer.
Do the friends have motives to kill Bron, or each other? Do they have motivations to protect Bron, or each other? Will Blanc, there perhaps by accident, save the day? As the plot unfolds scenes are deftly shown through different perspectives.
This is a well-acted, well-scripted, funny, stylish entertainment, with Craig growing into this idiosyncratic role as part of his post-007 career.
If you liked the first film, I think you will like this one even more.
If you are feeling the fatigue of the festive season, if you’ve had one too many kombuchas, this is a good escape hatch.