A Man Called Otto

Marc Forster’s film remakes the 2015 Swedish adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s 2012 novel, A Man Called Ove, which took two nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, Foreign Language Film and Makeup and Hairstyling, and won neither. Its clearest structural choice makes the suicide attempts a recurring device. Each one is interrupted by a neighbour, so the comic engine and the heaviest material run on the same mechanism, and the pattern repeats four times, set up in detail each time before it breaks off. Young Otto in the flashbacks is played by Truman Hanks, Tom Hanks’s son, so the resemblance needs no makeup. The flip side is that those passages are the film’s only warm register, and the narrative escapes into them whenever the present turns unbearable. Shooting was in Pittsburgh, on a cul de sac in Bellevue that production designer Barbara Ling found by scanning Google Earth; Forster did not want the street to read as either coast. Mariana Treviño won the part with a self tape from a Spanish hotel room in which she played several characters. A good fit if you accept that Otto stays fixed and Marisol does all the moving. Not for viewers who would rather not watch a suicide attempt being set up; this film builds that moment four times.