Movie Reaction: A Man Called Otto

Formula: Grumpy Old Men - 1 man

I'm a fan of "nicecore". That's the diminutive world people use to talk about shows or movies that are about nice people being nice. Don't get me wrong, I love a good story about the worst people in the world being awful too. But, there's something deceptively difficult to writing nice. It's easier to write something where a character is willing to throw a wrench into something for no good reason. It's harder when characters are aligned. And I've really come to appreciate the subcategory of "nicecore" about a person who thinks they are mean discovering they are nice. I don't mean a Scrooge having a change of heart. I mean someone who just doesn't realize their own nature. Recently, Honor Society was a great example of this. So is A Man Called Otto.

This movie, as you would expect, is about Otto (Tom Hanks). He's a recently retired widower. He's a man who likes when things work. It upsets him when things don't work. Given that the world is messy, he's become crotchety over the years. Just as he's given up on his ability to fix things, a series of small events like new neighbors moving in, convince him that he still has something to offer. The tagline for this is quite accurate: "Fall in love with the grumpiest man in America". Grumpy isn't mean. Grumpy is a puzzle.

This is something director Marc Forster has explored before. Both Christopher Robin and my beloved Stranger Than Fiction are about men who has largely shut themselves out of the world who are shaken out of their rut by some outside force. In Stranger Than Fiction, it's the disembodied voice of a narrator. In Christopher Robin, it's the return of an old friend. In A Man Called Otto, it's a new neighbor who won't accept Otto's prickliness. In all of these cases, the men are good people who forgot how to show it. That's what I like about A Man Called Otto. Otto never gets nicer. The same things annoy him. He just finds the ways to work around them. And it takes something that I'm dubbing a "Manic Pixie Dream World". Instead of a dream woman to get him out of his rut, it's a whole world that seems determined to find the good in him.

Tom Hanks is understandably good in this. He's America's Dad. He can't help but be lovable. Yet, he's believably a grump too. It's a role he's played a lot and he's refined it with age. The film is well-populated with people who are just on the right side of Stepford. New neighbor Marisol (Mariana Trevino) is the exact kind of friend he needs. I like the flashbacks to young Otto (Truman Hanks) with his wife (Rachel Keller) to let the audience know that Otto has always been like this and what kind of person it takes to break down his walls.

I've already gone on long enough, but I do still need to talk about the fact that this is a Hollywood remake of a Swedish movie that was based on a book. I get why people complain about Hollywood remakes. People shouldn't be that afraid of subtitles. Hollywood studios with their assorted corporate entities and meddling producers can suck the life out of an idea. Often, the films retain only the one-sentence pitch and lose all the charm on the margins that made the original so good. Often though, I think people complain about the remake because they have a stick up their ass (myself included sometimes). It's reflexive snobbery. I haven't seen A Man Called Ove, the Swedish version. I have no issue with Otto, but I can definitely sense some things that were likely lost in translation. There's a running gag throughout Otto where he tries to commit suicide but keeps getting thwarted by what turns out to be an opportunity to be a good person. That's something that requires nimble handling and specific alchemy to work. In Otto, it feels more forced than I assume it did in Ove. Like an element they knew they needed to keep but had no real desire to. The street Otto lives on also feels out of place. It feels like that setup might've been more specific to Sweden. The Otto movie is probably less prickly than the Swedish version. I assume much of that is because the prickly parts wouldn't translate as well. While overall, I did like Otto, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was reverse-engineering something.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend