Review: Tom Hanks plays a cantankerous widower in a spotty Hollywood redo of “A Man Called Ove”
Working together for the first time since 2004’s “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Magee have reimagined Holm’s vision by scaling back the cynicism, softening the central character’s tragic backstory and dulling the black comedy. Yet it’s Hanks’s performance that sets this Hollywood remake apart from the original. As inhabited by Rolf Lassgard, the character of Ove was abrasive, obtuse and pragmatic to a fault.
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.
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.Such a grave development, while tonally apt in “Ove,” jars in the more broadly comedic “Otto.
“Otto” is most at home in that vividly realized middle-class neighborhood, as composer Thomas Newman’s plucky score hums along, the amiable characters trade acts of kindness and Treviño’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.
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
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