A Man Called Otto (2023) ****

Heart-warming tale of a suicide wannabe. Yep, the studio didn’t know how to sell it either, and the trailer had originally put we off, a gurning Tom Hanks and the annoying neighbor from hell. And it just shows what a sick character I must be that I was chuckling all the way through. Because, yes, and without any attempt at black comedy, Otto (Tom Hanks) spends the first half of the picture trying to commit suicide, depressed, we later discover, at the death of his wife.

As if a riff on The Marriage of Figaro, we first encounter Otto when he is measuring rope for a noose with which to hang himself. But being a truculent nit-picking type of guy – the Everyman you would cross the street to avoid – he gets into an argument with the store manger on account of not being to buy exactly the length of rope he wants. Suffice it to say that this homespun guy who otherwise can fix anything and has every tool known to man can’t grasp the mechanics of suicide. He’s one foot in the grave when he would clearly prefer two.

While he’s failing at this one simple task he’s getting annoyed to pieces by the new pregnant neighbor Marisol (Mariana Trevino) and her hapless husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who can’t fix anything and by virtually everyone else in his universe who can’t follow simple rules like displaying your car sticker in the proper position. He’s an artisan trapped in a world controlled by idiots, blasting away at the inanities and inequities of modern life.

It takes such a long time to warm up you think it’s never gone to manage the switch into feel-good movie, what with so many numbskulls getting in the way, and Otto being the kind of guy who will fall out with his best friend because he bought the wrong kind of car. And it takes so long because it’s hardly gentle stuff, instead mostly biting, or inexplicable especially when Marisol takes off on a great riff of Mexican words.

His past opens up, courtesy of mementoes, and we realise he wasn’t always this kind of walking rulebook keep-off-the-grass poster boy.

Critics have been pretty sniffy about this but audiences know better and are turning out in bigger droves than for Tar, Babylon or The Fabelmans because it’s what audiences have been crying out for for so long – a good well-made drama that touches on some pretty awful feelings and doesn’t take the easy way out. Otto is made to work pretty hard to find community among people he automatically despises.

I’m not sure we need the flashbacks where a younger cuter Otto (Truman Hanks, yep even here, nepo abounds) romances his wife, because Otto gets over the line on his own within his grumpier shell without reverting to the nicer, shy guy he once was, cute as that tale is. And there’s an equally unnecessary nod to contemporary tropes, what with Otto showing his kinder side by taking in a trans and social media demonstrating how much it can be a boon – rather than a menace – to society when Otto decides to take up the cudgels against real estate villains.

The characters are all so – what’s the word I’m looking for – real. Even the dumbest of them, initially portrayed in somewhat cartoon fashion,  turn out to be just human.

As I said, I was chuckling or straight out laughing all the way through and I’m glad to say that Marisol and I connected on the sickest joke of all, the one about the big heart (I’m not going to give that one away).

Given I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, all advertising having carefully avoided any mention of the S-word, and was really only squeezing this into my weekly triple bill because of limited choice, and the trailer did it no favors, my heart sank as that esteemed outfit the British Board of Film Censors stepped in where Hollywood marketing persons feared to tread and announced, in its apparently regulatory slot, that this movie contained “suicide theme.”

That certainly got my attention, but did nothing for my confidence in a piece of entertainment, wondering if I had been mis-sold or misled, but within a few minutes Otto’s antics had me in stitches.

Tom Hanks (Elvis, 2022) is back to his best after a few dodgy characterisations and in too many films that seemed to disappear into the maw of the streamer. And it says a lot for his creative juices that he chose a part that played very much against type. But Mariana Trevino (Polvo, 2019) is the bonus here, a comedienne of genius.

Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, 2001) is back on form, too, totally in command of a movie that could so easily have slipped sideways into a vat of treacle or the other way into the outer space of black comedy. David Magee (Lady Chatterley’s Lover) wrote the screenplay based on Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove which had been turned into a film in 2015.

Ignore the critics, go see.