A Man Called Otto

I had hoped one silver lining to the death of commercial arthouse cinema would be that American producers would no longer have the incentive to purchase quirky little European pictures and remake them into schmaltzy, easily consumable English language versions with movie stars in career decline. Tom Hanks hasn't yet reached that category of actor, so I guess he and Gary Goetzman are getting a jump on this dying trend while there are still a tiny handful of old folks actually buying movie tickets. The Playtone team adapts Swedish writer/director Hannes Holm’s 2015 Oscar contender En man som heter Ove, nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature and Best Makeup & Hairstyling. That amusing picture, which featured a winning lead performance from Rolf Lassgård, was based on the bestselling novel by Fredrik Backman. To direct this American version Hanks and Goetzman brought on Swedish ex-pat Marc Forster, whose curious career includes blockbusters like Quantum of Solace and World War Z, along with more heartstringy fluff like Finding Neverland and Christopher Robin. The screenplay is courtesy of David Magee, whose first screen adaptation Finding Neverland, scored him an Oscar nomination, and he's been adapting material for the movies ever since, including Life of Pi, Mary Poppins Returns, and the upcoming live-action reboot of The Little Mermaid.

In this version of Backman's grumpy old man story, Hanks plays the titular man called Otto, a depressed, suicidal widower whose only reason for living seems to be yelling at people about the state of things these days and scolding others for minor rules infractions. But when a cheery young family moves into his rapidly changing neighbourhood, he embarks on an unexpected friendship that causes him to reassess his desire to leave this world.

From the first scene, in which we meet Otto chewing out the young staff at a Home Depot-like megastore, the film comes across as utterly false. We can picture actors who made their late-in-life-careers playing grumpy old men (Walter Matthau, Alan Arkin, Bill Murray) throwing this script in the trash after reading the first two pages. Everything about the way Otto is set up is contrived, and each exposition dump and flashback reveal that explains why he acts the way he acts is saccharine. Hank's son Truman Hanks plays the old man in flashbacks to his young days courting, marrying, and caring for his idealized, sunkissed, beatific wife, played by Rachel Keller. These flashbacks are meant to endear us to Otto. They do not succeed.

Each sequence plays out with such insulting predictability that the film is a genuinely unpleasant sit. Watching this old White guy help out his inept but big-hearted Latino neighbours while "learning valuable lessons" from them reeks of shameless pandering to the movie's target demographic of elderly liberals who still think they have something valuable to teach immigrants about the American way of life. The original Swedish film was hardly full of unexpected twists. Still, Ove was a mercurial character, and Lassgård was an unpredictable actor, resulting in a movie that kept you curious even though you were pretty sure how it would all end. With "America's Dad" in the role, there is no chance of any uncertainty or surprise. We just wait and wait and wait for the damn thing to end.