Review: A Man Called Otto

A Man Called Otto
Cert: 15 / 126 mins / Dir. Marc Forster / Trailer

Content warning: This film contains upfront references to suicide. Along with various spoilers, so does this review.

A Man Called Otto is the new outing from Marc Forster (written for the screen by David Magee), as we follow its titular hero (played by Tom Hanks) struggling to adapt to life without his recently deceased wife (played by Rachel Keller in an ongoing series of flashbacks). Otto has always been a stickler for order and routine, but cannot find comfort in these at his lowest ebb. An attempt to take his own life is interrupted when a young family (Mariana Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, with Alessandra Luna and Christiana Montoya) moves in across the road of the gated compound which he has made his fiefdom over the years. Never one to share his problems publicly Otto slowly warms to these new arrivals, although his own demons prove harder to evict...

First things first: the film is nowhere near as twee and cuddly as its carefully market-tested trailer might suggest. Second things second, it's nowhere near as coherent and heartwarming as it needs to be, either. The central lane of this particular journey is a man repeatedly trying - and failing - to take his own life. Adapted from a Swedish novel and its own screen-version, the fingerprints of a pitch-black European farce are still evident, but it's clear much has been lost in translation (not to English, but to Hollywood™). In a bid not to upset the mainstream appeal of its leading man, the film never truly explores the depths of his despair, opting instead for a series of soft-focus flashbacks in which genuine emotion is drowned in cack-handed schmaltz. Back in the present-day, everyone seems to be acting for the PG13 Judd Apatow version of the movie, also at odds with the story about actual grief.

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It's probably worth remembering that this is the director who previously helmed Christopher Robin and World War Z; both from much loved source material, both ambitious with clear good points, and both something of a mess when all was said and done. Hanks plays Hanks™ here of course, great in its own right but not suitable for a character who needs much rougher edges. Hoping to come across as Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, Tom's curmudgeonly outbursts at neighbours and store-clerks never really convince, and while his quieter scenes of reflection are much more reliable they feel like similar performances from his other films.

Worse still is the bewildering choice to cast Hanks' actual son Truman as his younger-self for the unfurling flashbacks: a man who neither looks, sounds nor acts like his father. If anything, Truman seems to be channelling the wide-eyed, clunky innocence of Forrest Gump, which would be fine except that's not the way Tom is playing things, even if both characters are clearly neurodivergent (but in massively different ways - Tom understands this, at least). So for two thirds of the film you never forget that you're watching Tom Hanks, and for the other you never believe that this guy is going to grow up to be Tom Hanks...

That said, at least they tried to solve this with casting. One flashback sequence features a digitally de-aged Hanks to play Otto at a point where he neither looks like 27yr old Truman or 66yr old Tom. And as CGI-work goes, it's not too bad. Well, not too bad apart from the effects team's range of reference material meaning that every intercut camera angle shows Hanks at an apparently different point of his younger life, as if the one scene out by his garage takes place over about ten years.

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The reason all of this is so frustrating is that when A Man Called Otto does work, it's nothing short of beautiful. At its core this is a story about companionship and humanity, and the best sub-plots are the quieter ones where the performers aren't relying on the dialogue. Given how robbed of screen-time everyone apart from the Hanks's are, it's actually remarkable that Rachel Keller, Mariana Treviño and Mack Bayda turn out to be the film's high points. There were a couple of moments where even a hardened old cynic like myself almost had Something In My Eye, and they hint at a much better version of exactly the same story waiting to be made.

But ultimately, there's just not enough connective tissue between what's great and what Columbia Pictures thinks the audience of a Tom Hanks movie wants, expects and indeed deserves. Story-turns and reveals feel sketched in, and it's left to the goodwill of the audience to paper over the cracks in the screenplay*¹.

Not as bad as it could be, nowhere near as good as it should be, the necessary darkness is almost non-existent and Marc Forster can't even get the heavy-handed, cookie cutter, mawkish sentimentality right. A Man Called Otto has moments of greatness, just not enough to make it the film it wants to be.

*¹ Okay spoilers, highlight-to-read: In the third-act it's revealed that Otto's wife Rachel had been paralysed in a traffic accident shortly after they were married and had moved into their dream-house in the 1960s or 70s. There was an earlier throwaway comment (in the present-day) from a neighbour about the house having low-worktops in the kitchen (except they're not that low, so at that point you just assume Rachel was short), but this new information comes after we've already seen that the house has an upstairs. And no stair-lift. Otto and his wheelchair-bound wife have apparently lived for over forty years in a house where he's had to carry her upstairs - unaided - every single day, and apparently he's not then built like Hulk Hogan. And we know by now that he's got a heart condition as well. Neither of them had thought about moving to a house more suitable for their needs, they're both so in love with their dark, poky little new-build, inner-city compound-condo, even getting slightly outraged when more houses are built at the end of the street (that they can't see until they go outside, since they're facing their opposite neighbours across the dual-lane tarmacked roadway). It's like they're all living in an open prison-complex, and this script feels like it's still in second-draft... [/End] ^{[ BACK ]}

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