Jonah Naplan January 15, 2023
The trailer for “A Man Called Otto” is wildly misleading. It doesn’t make the movie out to be especially good, and now having seen the film, it also hides away all of the movie’s strongest and most thematic elements that will only be briefly touched upon in this review. Because the best way to come to your realizations about what Marc Forster’s film really wants to say and why the movie is so good at saying it is by seeing the movie for yourself. And the film is heartwarming, funny, timely, and often very, very sad.
“Fall in love with the grumpiest man in America,” is the tagline for all of the marketing for “A Man Called Otto,” and yet Otto is not a character you begin to love, so much as you just want to help him get through the day and hope that he finds at least one thing to put a smile on his face. His character and his movie are both adaptations of an adaptation of a book called A Man Called Ove, made into a Swedish film in 2015. And this American revision centers on Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), the typical old man down the street, who appears mean on the outside, but has a reason for being in the inside, or doesn’t really have much of a reason anymore, as we learn.
On a daily basis, Otto almost impressively finds a way to criticize everything. He yells at UPS drivers temporarily parked without a permit, curses under his breath at the people who don’t lock their bikes onto the bike rack while visiting his neighborhood, and nearly explodes with annoyance while frustratingly sorting recyclable materials into their correct, publicly categorized bins. After his wife died of cancer, Otto finds himself with nothing left to live for anymore, and after a quite frankly terrifying beginning scene—I was jarred since I haven’t read the novel—we realize just the lengths in which Otto is truly, and exponentially, getting more and more depressed.
And Marc Forster’s film about Otto and the many “curmudgeons” in his life is not one that holds your hand through its most tense moments, nor is it anything close to the conventional feel good movie of the year that I expected. “A Man Called Otto” frequently comes off as excessively dark, but not pretentious; self-satire, but not silly; and human, but not ethereal. It’s the kind of film that is laudable for not falling into the trap that is tonal imbalance, and “A Man Called Otto” so often teeters on the edge of inconsistency.
When a new Mexican-American family moves in across the street from Otto—I believe it was a Persian family in the novel—the man is less than open to interaction, despite the open arms and infectious friendliness that the husband and wife, Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Ruflo) and Marisol (Mariana Treviño), and two kids have to offer. But the relationships Otto begins to form with this family, particularly Marisol, make for the film’s most rewarding moments. Otto doesn’t manifest happiness when he’s with his neighbors, but it becomes more and more clear that they begin to give him a new reason to keep living as the film progresses.
Otto is not hateful about how the world works, and it’s not as if he’s going far out of his way to find things that annoy him. Otto merely complains about the stuff he sees on an everyday basis, not because it’s directly affecting his person, but because it’s slightly imperfect. Marisol has to put up with Otto, but teaches the old soul to find the shimmers of gold within himself. Through the stories Otto tells, and the flashbacks the film provides, we learn about Otto’s deceased wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller), and the reasons why he is his grumpy way. Young Otto is played by Hanks’ son, Truman Hanks, and the young man gives an okay performance, supported by what I thought was a strong narrative.
In the film’s most dramatic scenes, these flashbacks shock the screen in quick zaps, so often that it could sometimes come off as cheesy. And yeah, maybe it is just a little bit much—backed by plot threads already overstuffed into a movie with a few too many characters. Otto still has a relationship with a couple “non-idiots,” but his old friend Reuben (Peter Lawson Jones)—who helped Otto achieve his engineering goals at a younger age—and his wife Anita (Juanita Jennings), are supposedly soon to be ushered out of the neighborhood and into a special care facility by the realtor company, Dye and Merica, a name that is never once taken seriously in the film.
It’s not until Malcolm, a transgender student of Sonya’s approaches Otto one night, after his dad kicks him out of the house, that our protagonist realizes just how much he truly is valued. Otto is not the nicest man around, but he isn’t heartless. He understands some of the things that occur outside his line of comfort are out of his control, and that he can only do just enough to restore the clean and spotless neighborhood he once knew. Suppose another older man had a heart attack next to Otto, and happened to fall right onto a train track, which coincidentally occurs in the film. Otto does not hesitate to jump onto the track and help this poor man. Otto is not a monster; he has some sense of good-spirited living. But it takes a new and younger family, even if it’s one with not as much life experience as he possesses, to help him realize that his life isn’t really all that bad. Marisol, her husband, and their two children open Otto’s heart, and it rarely closes itself again.
Marc Forster has here crafted a film so well tailored to our times that its optimistic tone becomes infectious. And with an ending that feels bittersweet yet inevitable, “A Man Called Otto” is a wild mix of emotions that plays with the deepest depths of the human heart.
Now playing in theaters.