Something to watch tonight: Monday 4 September

A Man Called Otto (Forster, 2022) is streaming on Neon and Prime Video

Moving this week from digit­al rent­al to sub­scriber stream­ing on Neon and Prime Video1, the Tom Hanks vehicle A Man Called Otto starts out by under­min­ing Hanks’ nice guy per­sona but even­tu­ally – and sat­is­fy­ingly – con­firms it.

For a long peri­od, I had thought that Hanks had been mis­cast. Not because it was too obvi­ous that “the nicest man in Hollywood” couldn’t remain a grouch for the whole film – although that is true – but because I didn’t think the jour­ney was going to be long enough, dra­mat­ic­ally speak­ing. I could ima­gine Clint Eastwood play­ing Otto (twenty or so years ago) and hav­ing some real men­ace behind his ter­rible ini­tial beha­viour, giv­ing the inev­it­able even­tu­al redemp­tion some meat to go with the potatoes.

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Even when Hanks’ Otto is being appalling, there’s enough of a glint behind the eyes that the audi­ence knows what’s coming.

That’s when I real­ised that it isn’t just the audi­ence that can see what’s behind the cur­mudgeonly façade – the neigh­bours can, too. They loved him when his wife was still alive (although they mostly loved her) and they for­give him now she has gone.

That’s the great jour­ney of the pic­ture. Not Otto’s trans­ition from grinch to do-gooder, but his real­isa­tion that he is loved – can still be loved – and his choice to live up to that love.

That’s from my review of the ini­tial cinema release at RNZ.

Something I did not think to high­light at the time but was reminded of by a read­er, was that this black com­edy includes some ostens­ibly humor­ous and increas­ingly des­per­ate attempts at suicide.

This par­tic­u­lar read­er had not noticed the clas­si­fic­a­tion “M Offensive lan­guage & sui­cide themes” and review­ers like myself hadn’t done a good enough job of point­ing it out. As someone who was still griev­ing the loss of a loved one, the exper­i­ence of watch­ing an uplift­ing Tom Hanks movie turned out to be very upset­ting for them.

I’m pleased that the descrip­tion on the Neon site is much clear­er: “Contains themes of self-harm and/or sui­cide that may be upset­ting for some viewers.”