Movie Details
A Man Called Otto(2022)
Director:Marc Forster
Cast-Tom Hanks: Plays Otto Anderson, a widower who plans to end his life. Truman Hanks plays the young Otto.
Mariana Treviño: Plays Marisol, Otto’s Mexican-American neighbor.
Rachel Keller: Plays Sonya, Otto’s wife who passed away months before the movie starts. Keller also plays the younger version of Sonya in flashback scenes with Truman Hanks.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo: Plays Tommy.
Mike Birbiglia: Plays the dye and real estate agent.
Cameron Britton: Plays Jimmy.
Mack Bayda: Plays Malcolm, a transgender teenager who was thrown out of his house by his father.
Juanita Jennings: Plays Anita.
Alessandra Perez: Plays Abbie, Marisol and Tommy’s second daughter.
Rita Wilson: A producer on the film.
Movie type- Comedy/Drama
Release date-13 January 2023
IMDB Rating-7.5
Languages- English
Duration-2 Hour 6 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
When your beloved wife who meant the world to you dies and you get fired from your job, you do the most sensible thing. You buy a piece of rope in Obi, yell at the salesman, raise tonsils to the hated neighbors for bad waste sorting and hang yourself. At least that’s how a sleazy man named Otto envisioned it, for whom life is a perpetual conflict with a bunch of limited idiots, whether it’s people at work, on the street, in a small-town neighborhood, or anywhere else. Reuniting with a woman through swinging is not possible, however. Why? Because malevolent fate has put one last big obstacle in Otto’s way. New neighbors. Loud, incompetent idiots from somewhere in South America. All that’s left is for Otto to get his head out of the noose and go give them a good thrashing.
If you haven’t read Frederik Backman’s literary masterpiece A Man Called Ove, or seen the Swedish film of the same name, you’ll be in for a huge advantage with this Hollywood version from veteran director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, World War Z) – you’ll enjoy the amazing buffoonery of one of the world’s most annoying old men, without knowing in advance how it will all end. And this is played by Tom Hanks, whose acting qualities have been tested by many Oscar nominations over the years, two of which he managed to transform (Forrest Gump, Philadelphia). He already tried the malevolent old man in Elvis, but it was only in A Man Called Otto that he could take a similar role to the extreme, because the role really required it. Aging Otto is anything but the kind of person you’d want as a neighbor. Nothing escapes his searching gaze, he notices your every transgression and is ready to call you idiots at the top of his lungs. And Tom Hanks puts himself into his role with gusto, and we eat every drop of human contempt out of it.
Although maybe not quite. Otto, played by Tom Hanks, is exactly the prototype of a person who, despite his noisy gruffness and obscenity, manages to pleasantly surprise others in the end. And thus also himself. If, of course, he doesn’t manage to commit suicide first. Maybe it’s because of Hanks’s good-natured face, which we’re used to seeing in so many positive roles that you won’t quite believe his brashness. Compared to Clint Eastwood’s rudeness in the unattainable Gran Torino, Otto is a smiling, good-natured grandfather from the neighborhood, who, although he makes a fuss when his children steal cherries from him over the fence, but then brings them a torn bucket himself. Watching Hanks babble and swear is so tinged with the sweet motif of impending redemption and transformation into a good-guy weirdo you just have to love.
The biggest weakness of the film is the believability of the individual characters. If A Man Called Otto is to be considered a serious drama with elements of dark humor, it is populated by far too unrealistic characters whose unnaturalness literally screams from the script. Of course, Tom Hanks still comes out as an absolute winner, but his opponents generally fall into the field of losers. Unfortunately, it is most obvious with Otto’s biggest antagonist, the new neighbor Marisol played by Mariana Treviño, whose Latin American nature is a wild hurricane that gives Otto a terrible headache, but at the same time, her easy playing makes the eccentric character a difficult to believe (and slightly annoying) person. The same applies to most of the neighbors (Cameron Britton) and other characters (Mack Bayda), because they resemble carefully constructed caricatures of human figures more than ordinary people next door. And that’s a shame. As a supporting role in a play, they might be fine, but in a film where a devastated old man tries to commit suicide because of the loss of his wife and job, he seems too out of place.
I don’t want to compare Otto with Ove, because they are both adaptations of the same book, but I can’t get rid of the impression that the Scandinavians are a little further in the combination of drama and dark humor – and the Swedish Man named Ove is an example of this. Because they can, with complete naturalness, serve human suffering hand in hand with sky-high human pettiness and stupidity, which they make fun of with a completely serious face. You won’t find this at Otto. Sure, there is a conflict between the world of the celestial jerk and his surroundings, but it is presented in pink cotton wool, somehow nice and without conflict, as if the twine that Otto intends to hang himself from is not real.
Play the trailerOn the other hand, it makes the overall tone of the film much more rewarding for the audience, and I daresay most will have trouble not loving Otto from the first moment he appears on screen. The stubbornness and rudeness is only temporary and you devour his every scene because you are rightfully waiting for the shell of his inaccessibility to crack and reveal a sensitive and loving inside. Because it seems that not every idiot is actually an idiot, although it may seem so at first glance. In the end, A Man Named Otto offers no controversy at all and instead retreats into a calm melodrama, from which he does not deviate for even a second. And the audience will adore him for it.
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