Even if you were not previously aware that this tolerable weepie derived from a Swedish film, you would, after the first 20 minutes or so, almost certainly guess it had origins outside the United States. There is an uncertainty of tone. Nobody seems quite who they are supposed to be. Hannes Holm’s A Man Called Ove, an Oscar nominee in 2017, focused on an ageing grump – enemy of all his neighbours – who constantly fails to kill himself on his way to (this really can’t be a spoiler) becoming a little more accommodating. It was a sentimental piece, but the Nordic sensibility permitted the blending of real bleakness in with the mawkish comedy. Those outbreaks sit less comfortably in a mainstream production from Columbia Pictures.
The new film, directed by a German – Marc Forster of World War Z and Quantum of Solace – dares to replace veteran Rolf Lassgård with the always welcome Tom Hanks. The two men are nearly exact contemporaries, but the Swedish actor made more of a lumbering, weighty everyman of the pernickety widower. Comparisons with Victor Meldrew were unavoidable. Slimmer than usual, Hanks, for all his everyday clothing, looks as toned and fit as a man who has spent the past 40 years enjoying the healthiest variation of the Hollywood lifestyle (which indeed he has). He seems hewn from less human clay.
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Anyway, the thing still works well enough as a middlebrow hankie dampener. Forster and his team keep the icy atmospherics by moving us to Pittsburgh in deepest winter. Otto Anderson lives miserably in a tidy, bland cul-de-sac whose bylaws he enforces with the rigour of a camp commandant. Nobody must park even an inch out of their allotted place. God help anyone who puts a can in the wrong recycling bin. Just as he is plotting to hang himself, a new couple (Mariana Treviño and Rachel Keller, both lovely) move in across the street and inveigle him into assisting with their hopeless attempts to set up home. Meanwhile a stray cat is trying to make friends and an older, estranged neighbour pleads with Otto to mend fences.
If you are waiting for that film in which a grumpy old fecker just gets grumpier, you will be waiting a while longer. Not unlike the earlier picture – based on a novel by Fredrik Backman – A Man Called Otto wants to have it all ways. Here is a man who rails against, as he sees it, all the vacuity of modern life, but, despite those curmudgeonly attitudes, he is endlessly open to all races, sexualities and gender identities. He may find himself unable to make up with a needlessly wronged old pal, but he is the one who opens up his door to a misused trans character.
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Fair enough. It would be asking a lot to transform a bigoted monster into a lovable old codger for the last act. Hanks has a relatively short gap to traverse and he does so with all the expected charm. Truman Hanks, the star’s son, is on hand to walk us through flashbacks so shamelessly sentimental they allow a scene in which a restaurant applauds when young Otto kisses his future wife.
For the most part, the picture ticks along at a calm Scandinavian pace, but, every now and then, Forster gives in to his more bombastic instincts. The cuts between a flashbacked catastrophe and a contemporary, life-threatening crisis to the rising strains of Kate Bush’s (immortal, to be fair) This Woman’s Work place more than a mere finger on the emotional scale. One senses, after that is over, the now overheated film fanning its armpits all the way to the final credits.
It seems unlikely, however, that many viewers will emerge entirely unmoved. The actors are too good. The pay-off too irresistible. We have started the cinematic year with far thinner broth.
