A Man Called Otto

Tom Hanks scowls and shines in his first legit "old man" role in this remake of the 2015 Swedish film that doesn't really have a reason to exist, but still brings the pathos.

I am not as a general rule a fan of the American pastime of taking good foreign language films and making a Hollywood version in English. It seems such an unnecessary and cynical endeavor. The resulting remakes — “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Let Me In,” “The Upside,” “Oldboy” — are nearly always a pale shadow of the original.

I get it: many moviegoers just don’t like to read subtitles. (Or — a lot more than we’d care to admit — aren’t good enough readers to keep up.) Still, these movies fail to pass what is my first, best standard for judging a flick: does this film need to exist?

It’s unlikely mainstream audiences are familiar with the 2015 Swedish movie “A Man Called Ove,” despite earning two Academy Award nominations. It’s about a man, a recent retiree and widower, who is a pain in the ass to everyone he meets because he grumpily thinks they are idiots who don’t live up to his exacting standards.

So most people may think the American version starring Tom Hanks, “A Man Called Otto,” is something fresh and original. It isn’t. The screenplay by David Magee is pretty much a note-for-note transposition of the story from Sweden to America. You just know that Otto’s cold, Grinch heart is eventually going to melt and he’ll cozy up to the people he’d been cruelly chastising.

Director Marc Forster, who worked with Magee on “Finding Neverland,” manages to find the tragic undertone in Otto’s story without things diving into despairing bleakness.

Even as the story opens and Otto, recently made both a widower and unwilling retiree, is attempting to kill himself, we sense the mirthful timbre that is the film’s base chord. The fact that his suicide attempts are continually botched or interrupted lets us know exactly the ‘laughter and tears’ groove in which “Otto” resides.

Things will get dark, but not that dark.

It’s a typically masterful performance from Hanks, who’s reached that elder statesmen status in Hollywood where we’ve come to expect excellence as routine. “Otto” is notable for being Hanks’ first legit “old guy” role, playing a character his own age (66) dealing with the sorts of existential issues that senior citizens often face: loneliness, regret, depression, a lack of purpose.

Perpetually scowling, with a cheap salt-and-pepper haircut and always wearing a coat and tie, Hanks’ Otto is a model of constancy and stubbornness. He’s the sort of guy who never changes, and is irked by the fact the world around him always is.

The parallels to Paul Newman’s cantankerous handyman in “Nobody’s Fool” are pretty obvious, and I wonder if the Swedish movie, and the novel it was based upon by Fredrik Backman, were lifted from it.

Otto Anderson is an engineer, the sort of guy who can fix just about anything and knows a lot about how things work. He’s also extremely dismayed that nobody else seems to share his affinity for doing things “the right way.” He can’t stand the way people park their cars or put their trash into the wrong recycling bins. His most common refrains are “No, no, no, no!”, usually followed closely by “Idiots.”

He rules his little row of low-end townhomes like an undeclared dictator. Every day begins with Otto making his “rounds” — ensuring people haven’t parked where they aren’t supposed to, let their dog poop in the grass, or otherwise engaging in idiot behavior.

The truth is it’s not a very attractive neighborhood, grayish and a bit squalid. These days most people are younger renters who put up with Otto and smile at his peevish chastisements. Once upon a time Otto and his best friend, Reuben, were the cocks of the walk. But Reuben has fallen into ill health and his wife, Anita (Juanita Jennings), is being pushed to sell out.

Comedian Mike Birbiglia turns up as the suit from the local real estate developers who want to tear the whole place down and put up more dreadful condominiums.

After being more or less forced to retire at the factory where he worked — or face the indignity of being supervised by an idiot he trained — Otto decides to end things. His wife, Sylvia, died six month ago, they never had children and he feels like there’s nothing keeping him around.

In typical Otto fashion, he makes even his suicide a production in pissiness. Measuring that he needs exactly 5 feet of rope to hang himself, he becomes incensed when the hardware store tries to charge him by the yard. It’s not the extra 33 cents; it’s the principle of the thing. That’s Otto’s problem: principles outweigh people.

His march to the grave is interrupted when a young Latino couple with children move in across the street, and Otto is annoyed at the husband’s (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) inability to parallel park a car with a trailer. The wife, Marisol (Mariana Treviño), rewards his help with homemade food, which he’s forced to admit is “not bad.”

More suicide attempts follow, which are thwarted by interruptions from Marisol or the other neighbors who need Otto’s help for this or that. Soon Otto is babysitting Marisol’s adorable girls, reading from story books and imitating a grumpy bear voice, which as you might guess he’s quite good at. He also undertakes teaching Marisol to drive, and forms a grudging admiration for the plucky, pregnant woman.

Yet another attempt to end his life at the train station winds up with Otto becoming an unwitting hero. In between, we see flashbacks to Otto’s life as a young man, his romance with Sylvia and omens of the events that led him to becoming such a bitter oldster.

I was surprised watching “A Man Called Otto” how little it diverges from the original film. Here the newcomers who shake up Otto’s world are Latin immigrants rather than Arab Muslims, and an awkward teen who reaches out to him for help is trans.

Just filigree changes, really. This has to have been one of easiest screenwriting jobs in Hollywood history.

So I’ve spent this review being an old grump complaining about them remaking a perfectly good Swedish movie for no reason. It still think it’s an idiotic thing to do. But I have to admit that “A Man Called Otto” is a deeply emotional story, and Hanks is utterly convincing in a different sort of role than we’re used to seeing.

This is basically a feel-good movie disguised as a tragedy.