A Man Called Otto: A Non-Super Semi-Hero

Amid an absolute box-office bloodbath for the autumn’s Oscar-bait movie releases, I wrote over at my daily-newspaper day job an essay arguing that the problem wasn’t just with an audience conditioned to head to the theaters only for the latest in computer-generated spectacle. The Oscar-aspiring movies themselves, however praised by critics, just weren’t making enough of an effort to be entertaining. It was as though the film industry had forgotten the commercial basics of its craft.

After that essay appeared I received an email from a Hollywood insider expressing strong agreement with my thesis and also saying, by the way, that a movie they themselves were involved with, due out shortly, was exactly the sort of thing I said was missing from the scene.

That movie is A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly widower and based on a Scandinavian novel, A Man Called Ove, which sold a lot of copies some years back. After a nice exchange with the insider, I accepted a screener link and then completely failed to use it: I was beleaguered by the holidays, I had to catch up on the important movies of the season — and theirs didn’t have much cultural buzz, the reviews were cursory, it seemed like it had been deliberately buried with a post-Christmas release date.

But without controversy, cachet, Oscar nominations, or media attention, A Man Called Otto has earned more money in domestic box office in the depth of winter than almost any serious fall release, and it will probably break $100 million worldwide. It isn’t a runaway hit by pre-Covid standards — but by the standards of this moment, for a non-superhero movie about normal human beings, that’s a very impressive take.

So now I’ve watched it. I’d like to say that its booster was completely right, that Otto is a work of classic-Hollywood genius that should have been nominated for Best Picture, and that Tom Hanks gives the greatest performance of his career. Alas, I can’t say that: It’s more reasonable to say that it’s a workmanlike example of old-fashioned movie entertainment, hoisted by one terrific performance by someone other than its famous star, that suffers from predictability and veers toward schmaltz but benefits from the contrast with the rest of what’s on offer at the multiplex.

The movie it called to mind for me, looking back on a different age in Hollywood, was 1997’s As Good as It Gets. There Jack Nicholson subverted his charisma to play a psychologically maladjusted jerk who’s brought back to humanity by a gay neighbor and a single mother with a sick son. Here Hanks subverts his normal good-humored charm by playing an ageing sourpuss and stickler who’s returned to humanity by a very pregnant Mexican-immigrant neighbor and various supporting characters (the elderly African-American couple, the transgender teen, the stray cat) who represent goodness and diversity.

Both movies marry this familiar style of liberal sentimentality to a slightly uncomfortable dramatic choice. In As Good As It Gets, the choice was to develop not just a friendship but a love story between Nicholson’s character and Helen Hunt’s single mom, who even independent of their age gap clearly deserves better. In Otto, the choice is to organize the story around Hanks’s character’s repeated suicide attempts and self-serious flashbacks to his tragic private griefs — which then are repeatedly interrupted by the antics and demands of his neighbors, creating tonal shifts between sorrow and slapstick that never quite find equilibrium.

And both movies depend on the female lead to partially resolve these self-created difficulties. In 1998, Hunt won a Best Actress award for making her character’s sentimental arc and romance with Nicholson almost believable. In 2023, Mariana Treviño should have earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work as Marisol, Otto’s pregnant Latina neighbor with two daughters and a hapless husband; she manages to hold the script’s demands for comedy and heartstring-tugging in nearly perfect equipoise. You believe fully that her character exists, something that can’t quite be said of other elements in the movie — such as the flashbacks to Otto’s courtship of his wife and the contemporary subplot about a wicked development company, both of which needed a little extra scripting help to achieve full plausibility.

But if you’re analyzing A Man Called Otto as a proof of concept for contemporary Hollywood, then its faults and implausibilities actually help your case. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s entertaining enough to draw people out, get some word of mouth going, and demonstrate that a theatrical audience for grown-up movies can still be coaxed to life. For those executives with ears, let them hear.