In Hannes Holm’s 2012 adaptation of Frederik Backman novel A Man Called Ove, Rolf Lassgård plays the titular curmudgeon’s peppery irritation to a hilt. Lassgård’s Ove is the kind of fastidious, rule-obsessed mini-tyrant who, if he owned a house on your block, might make you consider moving out of town. The abrasiveness of the actor’s turn lends some bite to the heartstring-tugging manipulations of the film’s script. Even when we know it’s playing us, the film holds modest appeal in the way that Ove’s ice-cold heart gradually melts.
But with an unconvincing Tom Hanks in the renamed title role, Marc Forster’s American remake, A Man Called Otto, offers nothing to distract from the grinding machinery of its plot. Hank’s seemingly natural affability has made him a venerable star, but it’s also his major limitation: He is, with very rare exception, such as his bizarre comic-grotesque take on Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, unable or unwilling to play an unlikable character.
Sure, Hanks has played grumps before, but his grouchier performances tend to telegraph his characters’ fundamental good-heartedness by channeling their more unsavory aspects with comedic overstatement. Think of cynical alcoholic baseball coach Jimmy Dugan in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own yelling at his female players; these moments of what might fairly be classified as emotional abuse are too ludicrously overplayed to be truly off-putting.
By contrast, Hanks’s Otto is a brusque, cold, and at times cruel man so traumatized by the recent death of his wife (played in flashbacks by Rachel Keller) that he’s decided to end it all. But not before subjecting everyone in his path to overbearing lectures on fairness, etiquette, and his homeowner association’s seemingly endless litany of rules. When we first meet Otto, he’s arguing with a hardware store clerk about being charged a few extra cents for a length of rope, which, we’ll soon learn, he plans to use to hang himself. That suicide attempt is stymied by the poor quality of the hitch he uses to attach the noose to his living room ceiling, and future efforts will be obstructed by a bevy of neighbors, most notably Marisol (Mariana Treviño), a new arrival to Otto’s street who keeps imposing herself on the old crank with amiable persistence.
Throughout A Man Called Otto, Hanks looks uncharacteristically adrift as Otto, unsure quite how much to balance the meanness of the character’s exterior with the forlornness of his interior. The result is one of the least assured performances of Hanks’s career, a shticky sourpuss act that brings to mind a depressed Ron Swanson impression. Misty-eyed flashbacks featuring Hanks’s real-life son, Truman, as young Otto only exacerbate matters, as the two actors rarely feel like they’re playing the same person. Truman’s performance is all wide-eyed naïveté, and his scenes, with their cutesy soft-focus cinematography and achingly sentimental needle drops, come off as mawkish imitations of the opening sequence from Pixar’s Up.
A Man Called Otto’s attempt to transplant Holm’s original story from small-town Sweden to Pennsylvania steel country is unconvincing. Otto’s neighborhood, with its attached row houses, manual swing gate, and shared recycling bins, drives much of the film’s action, but it retains a distinctly Nordic vibe that feels out of place in the Allegheny Valley. David Magee’s script also sidesteps any potentially tricky political friction one might expect in the scenario of an arrogant white man interacting with a Mexican immigrant woman by assuring us at every turn that, aside from some mild disdain for electric cars, Otto’s politics are comfortingly, unquestioningly liberal: He’s pro-regulation, pro-immigrant, and immediately accepting of transgender people.
Such a progressive point of view from an old crosspatch like Otto wouldn’t be such a problem if it felt like the filmmakers had a sense of why this man had come to these beliefs. As such, it’s hard to shake the sense that, like so much of the film, Otto’s liberalism is a calculated attempt to reassure us that this supercilious old codger is, deep down, a good-hearted sop. A Man Called Otto’s marketing promises a story about the grumpiest man in the world, but the film is so consistently toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.
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Hanks’ career is coming full circle. He started out as a mediocre comedian starring in middlebrow horseshit, and that’s how he’s gonna end, too.
Hanks’s performance and character here could be read as a metaphor of how the US ruling class and its liberal media see themselves: no matter how destructive, lethal and self-serving they might be, at heart their intentions are good, so stop your whining you commies, right? Even when Hanks attempted the role of a truly vile person such as the mob enforcer Michael Sullivan in Road to Perdition (2002), he was unable to come up with more than an everyman a little discontented with his job.