(For Day 16 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was for a close description of an object or place that ends with a surprising or seemingly unrelated line.)

There’s a woman ‘cross the way
Who halloos me every day,
Says she hopes I’m feeling better than I did the day before.
There’s a jogger every morning,
Even when it’s dark and storming,
Who declares a strong routine can win a footrace or a war.

There’s a kid who hates his chores
Throwing papers at our doors,
But he stops to extricate them if they land within a bush.
There’s a neighbor, just moved in,
Treats me like her next of kin,
And she has a way of knowing when to give a gentle push.

There’s a lady who cajoles
Me to try her casseroles,
Verifying if I’m sensitive to dairy, wheat, or nuts.

What idiots….
____________________

MPA rating:  PG-13

Tom Hanks had his heyday back in the 1990s, but his more recent films don’t seem to get the attention they deserve. Bridge of Spies, Greyhound, and News of the World were all outstanding roles for him, but I feel like his always reliable performances rarely get critical love, notwithstanding his Oscar-nominated supporting role in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Whatever character he embodies, audiences are used to seeing Tom Hanks as a nice and honorable guy, so it was a bit of a departure for him to play the crotchety Otto Andersen in this remake of the Swedish dramedy A Man Called Ove.

Otto is a man with little patience for anything that annoys him, and more things annoy him than don’t. A cynical widower, Otto patrols his row of apartments each day, barely tolerating his neighbors, and as he retires from his factory job, he has little to live for except planning his own suicide. That is until a friendly Hispanic family (Maria Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) moves in across the street, adding to Otto’s list of nuisances and conspiring with fate to foil his self-destructive plans.

Obviously, it’s a fine line when a film combines suicide with comedy. Some like Better Off Dead take the screwball route, whereas A Man Called Otto walks it tactfully, putting the proper weight to the scenes of Otto’s self-harm and keeping the humor of their repeated failure subtle. Hanks is a perfect curmudgeon here, yet his good nature comes out when needed, exemplifying how we don’t need to necessarily like someone or the world at large in order to act decently toward them. Treviño also does an excellent job as his pregnant neighbor Marisol intruding on his solitude and offering him something beyond his own grief. From its droll yet still likable main character to its tearjerking moments, A Man Called Otto is a winner of an American adaptation that makes me curious to see the Swedish original.

Best line: (Otto, teaching Marisol to drive) “You have given birth to two children. Soon it will be three. You have come here from a country very far away. You learned a new language, you got yourself an education and a nitwit husband, and you are holding that family together. You will have no problem learning how to drive. My God, the world is full of complete idiots who have managed to figure it out, and you are not a complete idiot. So, clutch, shift, gas, drive.”

Rank:  List Runner-Up (may go up with a rewatch)

© 2024 S.G. Liput
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