in A man called OttoAnd Tom Hanks He plays an older man named Otto, who is kind of a dick. He’s a little busy person. He lives on a quiet street in a suburb of Pittsburgh where everyone seems to know each other and where you need a parking pass in your window to park your car, or someone (Otto) will notice. Older residents, Otto among them, have little history. This does not prevent Otto from believing that everyone in his midst is an idiot. He’s right; Everyone is wrong. Executioners with their phones and social media. The young shop staff whose insistence on helping this old man find what he needs makes Otto feel his intelligence is being insulted. People who put rubbish in the recycling bin – which Otto, a stickler for the rules whose daily routine consists of making his rounds and righting his neighbours’ mistakes, focuses on retrieving it and dumping it in the right place. Nothing seems to make him happy. The retirement party only reminds him that he felt bad about the job he started at. And he has no one – his personality makes this unsurprising, but still. You watch, immediately jumping from wondering where his family is to thinking that the lack of family might explain why he is the way he is.
A man called Otto It is kind of funny as a Tom Hanks Experiment – did experiments. It says something about his personality. This is the man who played Mister Rogers, who once saved Matt Damon from World War II with his dignity intact amidst spectacular violence. He is reliable mr. Apollo 13And Captain Phillips And Sully It all rests on a strong moral spine, a rightness unaffected by an occasional short temper or stern look. Hanks is one of those actors who uses his toughness so clearly that you feel you must have earned it. When he gets weird, it’s almost like a joke: weirdness doesn’t come naturally to him. So he sometimes plays with the unnatural. gruesomeness, like the kind we saw earlier this year in Elvis, where Hanks played King’s slealy, bloated, carnival master, is a property that, in Hanks’ hands, only works (or tries to) because we know the actor is the complete opposite. We know this is wrong, but he’s a movie star, one of the best, and one of the last. When a movie star of this caliber hits the wrong note, we’re almost criminally willing to pretend it was on purpose. The compelling thing about Hank’s fatty slip ElvisAnd, which Hanks clearly enjoys, is that it would be hard to prove us wrong.
As Otto, Hanks plays the older fool in the About Schmidt Miscellaneous – classic encoder. Or to keep it in the Hanksiverse, a guy close to Jimmy Dugan, Mr. “There’s no crying in baseball”: an asshole who’s not bad at the end, the kind of guy you absolutely don’t hate, even when he’s hated, because you pegged him as an emotional mutant from the start. Otto is especially lovable, in his own way, kind of like a grumpy cat whose face you can’t help but hug despite hissing at you — because you somehow convince yourself the cat doesn’t mean it, even with your scratches bleeding. This is how Otto is treated by his new, younger neighbors, Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel García Rulfo), and their young children. They know they’re getting on his nerves. They know they’re asking for a lot of favors – becoming a huge part of a guy’s life who’s giving signals that he doesn’t want to be bothered. What they don’t know is that Otto has given up on his life – he was actually committed to killing himself when they moved across the street. what we I know a little extra love is exactly what the movie formula gods asked for.
A man called Otto Based on the 2012 novel A man called Oof by Fredrik Backman, which has already been made into a Swedish film of the same name. The movie is fine. Marc Forster basically knows what he’s got: a great star, a good script, a relatable story. did. Flashbacks tell us who he is (there was a wife, after all!) and why he is the way he is. Minor incidents involving Otto and his neighbors and the plotting to reduce this anger to so great kindness that it actually culminates in a sudden act of solidarity, the kind of move we should not have suspected Otto’s ability to make, because in the end, he is not a fool because he takes pleasure in it All of this stems from a deep sense of right and wrong. It’s a bar, but it’s not unfair.
The interesting thing is to think about what the movie is and what it isn’t. Otto got his gruffness in the hands of another actor – say, Clint Eastwood – who could easily become a strong-willed, grouchy slob, Gran Torino The antihero is on the same path from asshole to reluctant hero as Otto that we received, but with an uncomfortable bite. A man called Otto It often feels like you’re about to give us a really humiliating man—less of a simple jerk and more of the problematic grandfather you’re struggling to endorse. But he swerves like a virtuoso.
Perhaps that’s what can ultimately make a middling movie like this feel so kind of fun: A lovable cast of oddballs and friendly faces encircle the expert Hanks as he pulls off a familiar but complex two-step, treacherous dance in almost all that is wrong in, in the end, morally right directions. Everything is under his control. His hero is a hero from the very beginning. If anything, the movie almost makes up for it. The characters in Hanks’ midst are distinctly diverse, ticking different boxes (Latino, Black, trans, disabled, a whole range of ages) without – and fortunately – also Ironically engineered. Because Otto, as it is written, does not reject this world—because he does not slap a young trans man at his door, or throw racial shit at new minorities moving into his neighborhood—we have to understand that no matter how bad it is sound As it is, if he doesn’t complain about these things, he can’t be that bad. But the Hanks are already talking about it. He’s not in danger of coming across as a bad guy. His appeal is to convince us that he is flawed and forgiving enough, simply as a man.