When I reviewed the movie “A Man Called Ove” for this newspaper in 2016, I mused: “Sweden’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards proves that Swedish pictures can be just as sentimental and conventionally heartwarming as Hollywood- movies.”
That film, based on a Swedish bestseller, is about a thoroughly grumpy man who becomes suicidal after the death of his wife, until interactions with new neighbors soften his heart. It’s supposed that an American remake was inevitable, and here it is, directed by Marc Forster and starring Tom Hanks, with the main character renamed Otto.
Usually, American remakes of foreign films tend to homogenize the source material. But “A Man Called Otto” isn’t just more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.
Forster handles the backstory flashback (in which the star’s son, Truman Hanks, plays a younger Otto) in a gauzy-arty way. When the elder Otto – Hanks harks back to his excellent work in “Catch Me If You Can” to establish the man’s overarching irritability – reflects on his happy marriage, his mind always goes back to his earliest times. It’s curious, until the movie reveals why it’s avoided more recent memories, but by then the omission feels like a withheld cheat.
Otherwise, the obvious reigns here. When Otto visits an incapacitated former friend, the soundtrack plays Kenny Dorham’s version of the jazz chestnut “Old Folks”. That is of course always nice to hear. Later, a teenager initially reproached by Otto tells him that Otto’s wife, who had been a school teacher, “was the only person who didn’t treat me like a freak, because I’m transgender.” As television icon Marcia Brady once put it, “Oh my nose!”
A man named Otto
Rated PG-13 for themes and language. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theatres.