Everything gets turned up a notch; even the potentially uproarious scene of Otto dishing out abuse to a hospital clown withers in the clown’s telegraphed overreaction. The movie is trying so hard toa crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.
Otto, in case you were wondering, plans to use that five feet of rope to commit suicide. He’s still reeling from the recent death of his wife, and he intends to hang himself in his living room . I’ve never been crazy about botched-suicide comedy, going back to the prelude sequence of “Harold and Maude” . The reason isn’t that I think it’s so scandalous but that it’s actually, under the surface, quite sentimental. The joke is always the same: that the suicides fail because the person….
Otto occupies a condo in the same soothing blue prefab row-house development he has lived in ever since he married Sonya , the true love he first spotted on a Philadelphia train platform — she dropped her book! He picked it up and ran after her! All the way to the other side of the platform! — when he was a young man.
The film is threaded with flashbacks to their relationship, and they’re built on the potentially effective stunt casting of Truman Hanks, Hanks’s 27-year-old son, as the younger Otto, who came to Philly to enlist in the military, which turned into a doomed mission. Hanks’ acerbic actor son Colin has often seemed a chip off the old block, but Truman Hanks comes off as notably sweeter, softer, and more benign than his dad.
In case all those don’t get to you, the movie makes a point of throwing in a transgender former student of Sonya’s, who’s there to demonstrate that Otto may grouse at the world but that he sees it entirely without prejudice. He’s a hater with a heart of gold. “A Man Called Otto” wants to lift our spirits, but the trouble with it is that the nicer Otto gets, the more naggingly fake the movie becomes. It should have been called “Florid-est Grump.
This looks stupid
From Forrest Gump to Harassed Grump.