As the title character in \u0022A Man Called Otto,\u0022 Tom Hanks plays a cantankerous widower with an affinity for home repair.
In the process, a bleak dramedy has turned into a cozy crowd-pleaser. There’s nothing wrong with that, though the story’s darker elements don’t always jell with the frothier approach. A sexagenarian who revels in routine, Otto wakes up at 6:29 a.
m. – seconds before his alarm is set to go off – and makes the rounds in his gated Pittsburgh cul-de-sac. Among his activities: shooing away a stray cat, scolding the UPS driver for passing through without a permit and growling “idiots” under his breath at his exceedingly friendly neighbours. It’s all grumpy antics until Otto arrives at work, where he’s being forced out of his longtime factory job amid a corporate merger. After bailing early on his retirement party and heading home, he methodically cancels the electricity, vacuums the carpet, takes out the trash, ties a noose around his neck and tries to hang himself.Article content Such a grave development, while tonally apt in “Ove,” jars in the more broadly comedic “Otto.” But the film is less interested in Otto’s failed suicide attempt than the interruption that helps foil it: new neighbours in the form of pregnant mom Marisol , her easygoing husband and their two young daughters. Predictably, Otto bonds with the dysfunctional clan amid various diversions that reconnect him to his community. Along the way, he spars with a smarmy real estate agent , gets to know the transgender delivery boy and reconnects with an elderly couple at risk of losing their home. From time to time, he sweetly shares these tales over his late wife’s gravestone.Article content“Otto” is most at home in that vividly realized middle-class neighbourhood, as composer Thomas Newman’s plucky score hums along, the amiable characters trade acts of kindness and Trevino’s relentlessly positive Marisol breaks through to Otto’s walled-off emotions. Extensive flashbacks showing the courtship between a younger Otto and his wife, Sonya , as well as the hardships that embittered him, are less successful. Where “Ove” portrayed its protagonist as socially inept from childhood, the young version of Otto is a charmer so distant from the irritable old man he becomes that it strains credulity. The decision to skip over his parents’ deaths, depicted so devastatingly in the earlier film, further undermines the source material.Article content That said, Forster’s film deserves to be judged on its own terms. As cloying as this interpretation may be, there’s something soothing about its wholehearted vision of the “found” family and its virtues. Throw in an actor as likable as Hanks – back to form after uneven performances in “Elvis” and “Pinocchio” – and even the curmudgeons should be won over. Sure, it’s formulaic. And there will be no Oscar for this grouch. But as Otto might say, there’s nothing wrong with routine.Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At theatres. Contains mature thematic material involving suicide attempts, and strong language. 126 minutes. Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.
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