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In \u201cA Man Called Otto,\u201d Tom Hanks plays one of those misanthropic over-the-hill loners who never misses a chance to vent his spleen. Giving a hard time to everyone is what gets him through the day; you might call it his hobby. From Scrooge in \u201cA Christmas Carol\u201d to Alan Arkin in \u201cLittle Miss Sunshine,\u201d we\u2019ve seen this sort of get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon many times before. But with the right actor and the right script, it\u2019s a formula for yocks (and for gently rediscovered humanity) that audiences never get tired of \u2014 and Hanks, make no mistake, is the right actor for this role. For years, when he was America\u2019s top movie star, Hanks was routinely described as our own James Stewart, the soul of guy-next-door decency, but going back to his earliest performances in films like \u201cBachelor Party\u201d Hanks has always had an edge to him. That\u2019s why his niceness was never cloying. (James Stewart had an edge, too. All the great stars do.)<\/p>\n
The opening scene of \u201cA Man Called Otto\u201d is promising, as Hanks\u2019 Otto Anderson, a newly retired widower of about 60, attempts to buy a measurement of rope at a chain hardware store, only to learn that the store\u2019s bureaucratic pricing protocols won\u2019t allow him to pay for the exact five feet of rope he wants to purchase. He\u2019ll have to pay for six feet. This completely unhinges him, not because he\u2019s so cheap but because it\u2019s the sort of built-in consumer exploitation that represents, to him, a larger slackening of standards.<\/p>\n
Hanks harumphs with an irresistible self-justifying logic, and the clueless response on the part of the store\u2019s millennial clerks, who are doing all they can to accommodate his tantrum, is the icing on the high-dudgeon cake. The secret weapon of a scene like this one is that even though Otto is overreacting like a jerk, in his petty and snappish way he\u2019s sort of right. It should bother people, a little bit, that a corporation designs it so you can\u2019t just buy five feet of rope. <\/p>\n
If \u201cA Man Called Otto\u201d had followed up on the premise of that scene, it might have been a better movie \u2014 funnier, more biting, less formulaic \u2014 than the wheezy by-the-numbers tearjerker it is. Imagine that the Hanks character was stuck in a rut of bad vibes, but that much of his complaining was funny because it carried a caustic ring of truth. That sounds like a crowd-pleaser.<\/p>\n
But David Magee, who wrote the script of \u201cA Man Called Otto\u201d (inspired by the 2015 Swedish film \u201cA Man Called Ove\u201d), and Marc Forster, who directed it, don\u2019t have anything that witty in mind. The film starts off rooted in the real world but turns into a soft-headed \u201credemptive\u201d fairy tale. Everything gets turned up a notch; even the potentially uproarious scene of Otto dishing out abuse to a hospital clown withers in the clown\u2019s telegraphed overreaction. The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It\u2019s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than. <\/p>\n
Otto, in case you were wondering, plans to use that five feet of rope to kill himself. He\u2019s still reeling from the recent death of his wife, and he intends to hang himself in his living room (from a hole he punches into the ceiling \u2014 a doomed plan or what?). I\u2019ve never been crazy about botched-suicide comedy, going back to the prelude sequence of \u201cHarold and Maude\u201d (sorry, not a fan of that calculated cult \u201970s quirkfest). The reason isn\u2019t that I think it\u2019s so scandalous but that it\u2019s actually, under the surface, quite sentimental. The joke is always the same: that the suicides fail because the person\u2026really wants to live. In this case, the idea that Hanks\u2019 Otto has given up on life is a conceit the audience scarcely pretends to buy.<\/p>\n
Otto occupies a condo in the same soothing blue prefab row-house development he has lived in ever since he married Sonya (Rachel Keller), the true love he first spotted on a Philadelphia train platform \u2014 she dropped her book! He picked it up and ran after her! All the way to the other side of the platform! \u2014 when he was a young man.<\/p>\n
The film is threaded with flashbacks to their relationship, and they\u2019re built on the potentially effective stunt casting of Truman Hanks, Hanks\u2019s 27-year-old son, as the younger Otto, who came to Philly to enlist in the military, which turned into a doomed mission. Hanks\u2019 acerbic actor son Colin has often seemed a chip off the old block, but Truman Hanks comes off as notably sweeter, softer, and more benign than his dad. In almost any movie you\u2019d have to squint to buy him as the young Tom Hanks, but in this movie, where we have to believe that this angelic nerd evolves into a sharp-tongued malcontent, it\u2019s far too jarring a leap.<\/p>\n
Of course, it didn\u2019t just happen. There were\u2026events. And if there had been only one, it might not have planted the film on tracks of contrivance. But \u201cA Man Called Otto\u201d is built on enough Lame Screenwriting 101 devices to fill a trilogy of old-school second-rate awards-bait movies. There\u2019s the cataclysm that befalls Otto and Sonya. There\u2019s the long-simmering estrangement between Otto and his friends and neighbors (Peter Lawson Jones and Juanita Jennings). And, of course, there\u2019s the conceit that propels the film: Marisol (Mariana Trevi\u00f1o), Otto\u2019s new neighbor, gloms onto him for help, and he starts to help her so much that he practically becomes an honorary family member.<\/p>\n
In case all those don\u2019t get to you, the movie makes a point of throwing in a transgender former student of Sonya\u2019s, who\u2019s there to demonstrate that Otto may grouse at the world but that he sees it entirely without prejudice. He\u2019s a hater with a heart of gold. \u201cA Man Called Otto\u201d wants to lift our spirits, but the trouble with it is that the nicer Otto gets, the more naggingly fake the movie becomes. It should have been called \u201cFlorid-est Grump.\u201d<\/p>\n
View this article at Variety<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018A Man Called Otto\u2019 Review: Tom Hanks Plays a Florid Grump: In \u201cA Man Called Otto,\u201d Tom Hanks plays one of those misanthropic over-the-hill loners who never misses a chance to vent his spleen. Giving a hard time to everyone is what gets him through the day; you might call it his hobby. From Scrooge
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