A Man Called Otto is just like “The Selfish Giant” if Wilde had been a manipulative, condescending asshole. The Giant is Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), the fittingly snow-covered street where he lives is his garden, and his impracticable neighbors are the children who keep cramping Otto’s style — and by his ‘style’ I mean the cranky old coot with a secret heart of gold shtick that Clint Eastwood has been perfecting since the early 2000s, and which Hanks shamelessly rips off here.
Tom Hanks sure is no Clint Eastwood — nor does he need to be; he’s Tom fuckin’ Hanks for fuck’s sake! Hanks is not only good, but he’s good (great, even) at being good; he can get away now and again with a lovable rascal such as the title character in Charlie Wilson’s War, but Eastwood’s signature underlying misanthropic streak is not something that Hanks can or should aim for. Ever.
But anyway; going back to my initial simile, Wilde’s fairytales are shot through with rich allegory and symbolism, whereas A Man Called Otto is excruciatingly ad litteram. Consider this: soon after the hero’s heart has grown three sizes, we learn that he has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — that is to say, his heart is literally “too big.” If the filmmakers had any sense of humor, they would have had Otto revert to his cantankerous ways on doctor’s orders; then again, Otto’s condition is a textbook case of Lupus in Fabula; it’s only until someone says something about “look[ing] after that heart of yours” that Otto’s heart seems to realize that it does indeed require looking after, and halfheartedly (ha! I kill me!) lets its owner know about it — this is, mind you, more than halfway through the fucking film.
To be fair, though, the character’s failure is not entirely Hanks’s fault. The script makes Otto a grouch, but a politically correct grouch. Take Eastwood in Gran Torino; his character is a racist, but that’s what makes his transformation compelling — after all, “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” Otto, on the other hand, is a stickler for rules and regulations, but also a pushover; he bleeds his black next-door neighbors’ radiators, teaches his Mexican-Salvadoran neighbor from across the street to drive and babysits her daughters, and in the hokiest subplot in the entire movie, lets local transgender teen Malcolm (Mack Bayda) crash at his house after Malcolm’s unseen father has kicked him out (off camera). Before that, though, Otto and Malcolm have this heavy-handed exchange regarding Otto’s late wife Sonya: “Mrs Anderson was my teacher. She was the first person that didn’t treat me like a freak ’cause I’m transgender. She was the first to call me by my new name. She got the other teachers to do it too. It really helped me at school.” The only thing this scene’s missing is Keenen Ivory Wayans popping up and yelling “MESSAGE!!!”
Otto thinks that all of these people are “idiots,” but only because Otto thinks that everyone other than himself is an idiot: even his dislike is egalitarian rather than discriminatory. Furthermore, Otto goes out of his way, following a few perfunctory protestations, to grant each and every big and small favor that these individuals see fit to ask of him. Now, since Otto is by no mans a bigot, and his relations with his neighbors go from good to great, it’s safe to say that he is, before the events of movie even begin, already as decent a human being as can be reasonably expected, with little room for improvement. Conversely, the biggest challenge he faces is resolved in a couple of throwaway scenes — in a nutshell, Otto finds out that a real estate agency is planning to force his infirm black neighbors into a nursing home and take their house. With the help of the supporting cast and “social media journalist” Shari Kenzie (Kelly Lamor Wilson), the Evil Corporate Executive is thwarted in record time.
By the way, so contrived is the character of Malcolm that the filmmakers have him turn up as Shari’s cameraperson, presumably in a desperate bid to justify his (her?) existence. Uh, is this one of Malcolm’s several (and mostly unseen) part time jobs, or is he (she?) just doing Kari a solid (the logistics of which also take place offscreen)? And while we’re at it, one has to wonder how much help a social media journalist that can’t afford her own camera operator can really be.
Don’t get me wrong; a little uneventful slice-of-life escapism can go a long way in the right hands (Matthew McConaughey in The Beach Bum comes to mind). Perhaps if Hanks weren’t forced to play against type, A Man Called Otto could have been a breezy, harmless comedy (its setting certainly isn’t a million miles removed from The ‘Burbs); a movie, however, wherein Tom Hanks plays a sad sack whose repeated suicide attempts are made into a painfully unfunny running joke clearly has no fucking idea what the hell it’s doing.
90% of Everything is Crap 