A Man Called Otto (2022)
Directed by Marc Forster
When a lively young family moves in next door, grumpy widower Otto Anderson meets his match in a quick-witted, pregnant woman named Marisol, leading to an unlikely friendship that turns his world upside down.
6 connections found
View:
6 films that influenced A Man Called Otto
What critics say influenced A Man Called Otto
I’d pictured someone more along the lines of a live-action version of the old guy in Up because, in a way, Otto is like the first 10 minutes of Up combined with Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor: It’s about a cantankerous old guy who is no longer interested in living after the passing of his wife, Sonya (Rachel Kellar).
If such catharsis is what you seek, à la Pixar’s 2009 Up , then A Man Called Otto is for you.
But his biggest battle is with the developers who have been throwing up ugly new apartment buildings and chopping down trees (shades of 2009’s far superior Pixar film Up ).
Truman’s performance is all wide-eyed naïveté, and his scenes, with their cutesy soft-focus cinematography and achingly sentimental needle drops, come off as mawkish imitations of the opening sequence from Pixar’s Up .
It's like the first 10 minutes of Up , spliced throughout.
The messages of being kind and living right provide is an "It's a Wonderful Life" vibe to "A Man Called Otto."
In many ways, “A Man Called Otto” is a reconfigured version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Otto as George Bailey and Marisol, Sonya and a stray ragdoll cat as Otto’s angels.
Worse, Hanks isn’t even right for the role; he seems unable to shake his established persona to sell the emotional journey of a “mean” man we’re supposed to grow to love (an archetype Bill Murray and Clint Eastwood portrayed to near perfection in St. Vincent and Gran Torino, respectively).
Director Marc Forster's eclectic CV includes Oscar winners (Monster's Ball), Bond (Quantum of Solace), zombies (World War Z), and now this Gran Torino lite charmer - based on the 2012 Fredrik Backman book A Man Called Ove, which was made into a Swedish film in 2015.
It’s impossible to hear of a premise of a grumpy old man badgering people in his neighborhood without instantly thinking of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) and the instantly-iconic line, “Get off my lawn!”
Like The Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge and Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) in Gran Torino , Otto is a character whose disgruntled disposition is predicated on the hope of positive change.
As for Otto's bias against immigrants, it's skin deep like Clint Eastwood's in "Gran Torino."
And this is, of course, on the heels of the most famous Swedish-to-English remake, David Fincher’s Oscar-winning The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011).
Advertisement
Alas, Otto's plans to die by suicide are derailed by the arrival of new neighbors, the pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo from "The Lincoln Lawyer"), and their two young children.
The husband, Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer ), can barely drive and finds parking his car with its U-Haul trailer impossible.
Hell, Jack Nicholson gave us “About Schmidt” and “The Bucket List,” and Robert DeNiro had “The Intern.”