![]() Cat Kenney at Flatiron Books for the eArc copy of this book! Receiving it did in no way affect my review. Years after it began, Ivy and Dana’s shared story will come down to a reckoning among a daughter, a mother, and the dark forces they never should’ve messed with. As the trio’s aspirations darken, they find themselves speeding toward a violent breaking point. And the summer she turns sixteen, with the help of her best friend and an ambitious older girl, her gifts bloom into a heady fling with the supernatural. As the days pass, Ivy grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a burning question: What if there’s more to her mother than meets the eye?ĭana has always been perceptive. How you react to A Man Called Otto totally depends on whether you can go along with Hanks’ performance and, for the second time this year (after his over-the-top Colonel Parker marred the otherwise excellent Elvis), I found myself unconvinced by the mighty Tom.Ivy’s summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. It’s sentimental in a forced way and lacks the cynical bite many have said the original has, with any rough edges sanded off on its way to becoming big-budget, awards-friendly studio fare. It hit a sour note for me right from the start, making it a tough film to surrender to. In the end, A Man Called Otto is the kind of movie some folks will love, and some will dismiss. While they’re shown to have been faced with some adversity in later years, all of this is left offscreen, with Otto only recalling the early days, to the point that when Sonya appears to him late in the film, we only ever see her as a young woman. She and Otto seem like a mismatched pair, and their romance feels wafer-thin, right down to the big set piece, which is scored by Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” (although movie buffs will remember the song being used similarly in the underrated She’s Having a Baby). While this is meant to evoke how profound Otto’s loss was, Sonya never emerges as a full-fledged character but comes across as impossibly saintly. In his younger years, he’s played by Hanks’ son Truman, with his wife, Sonya, played by Rachel Keller. The film also includes a lot of flashbacks depicting Otto’s life with his wife. If, like me, you find the performance unconvincing, then the film becomes a bit of a sentimental ordeal. ![]() ![]() It lives and dies by Hanks’ performance, and if you find yourself moved by him in it, you’ll love the movie. ![]() It’s tough because A Man Called Otto is the kind of movie that will divide an audience. Hanks has this twinkle in his eye that makes Otto a lovable old guy, whereas perhaps a less beloved actor might have been better able to convey some pathos (I kept thinking Bryan Cranston would have been excellent). There’s also a cute cat that won’t leave him alone and quickly warns the old man’s heart.įor his part, Hanks seems to relish playing the grumpy Otto, but given how beloved he is, the role feels like a put-on. Unable to drive and often needing help with her kids, the pregnant woman usually has little things she needs Otto’s help with, to his initial dismay. However, whenever he gets ready to do the deed, he’s interrupted by his chipper new neighbour, Marisol (Mariana Treviño). He’s been forced into retiring from his job, and with empty days of sitting at home ahead of him without his wife, he decides to end things. Here, Hanks plays the curmudgeonly Otto, who’s been in a funk ever since his beloved wife died of cancer. One can’t fault the source material, even if the story likely lost something in the change of setting from Sweden to North America. Given that A Man Called Otto is a remake of a much-admired Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, which was based on a novel, one can reasonably assume the story has been done better elsewhere. The way Marc Forster directs this scene and Hanks acts it, this sequence feels like something out of a sitcom, and you never, for one second, believe Otto is so depressed that suicide is a legit option for him. In it, Tom Hanks’s character is so depressed that we’re supposed to believe that once he gets home with this rope, he will kill himself. This scene is depicted as “wacky,” and it just about sums up all of the issues I have with the film. He plans to go home and hang himself, but once he gets to the cash, he has a long argument about how they’re charging him for more rope than he needs. REVIEW: Early on in A Man Called Otto, there’s a scene where Tom Hanks, as the cantankerous Otto, visits a home hardware store to buy himself some rope. PLOT: A curmudgeonly widower named Otto (Tom Hanks) becomes entwined in the lives of his needy neighbors, much to his (initial) dismay.
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