I’m going to be completely honest when I say that when I booked tickets for five friends to see A Man Called Otto last week, I mistakenly assumed that it was about a grumpy old man who (maybe?) crawled out of his window (maybe?) to solve crimes, I think because Wife was only half listening when I asked her if she wanted to see it while I stayed home with the increasingly needy bedbug that we keep as a roommate, and she had mixed it up with the plot of a different Nordic author Jonas Jonasson and his novel The Hundred Year Old Man Who Crawled Out The Window, but also because I was thinking about Only Murders in the Building. This happens sometimes to me, where I will make a doctor’s appointment or just plan a social event and then slowly gaslight myself into thinking that it’s a totally different day or a totally different time. A friend, who didn’t come to see Otto because he said “it was his mom’s favorite book and so he needed to see it with her” (not the only time I heard that when talking about this movie, by the way), literally came up to me this afternoon to confirm that he and his wife had found a babysitter so that they could spend the evening with us tomorrow, which is when I told him that the thing I had invited him to was actually a week from tomorrow.
What I’m saying is this is no one’s fault except mine, but that up until about five minutes before I walked out of the house and braved some pretty nasty storm rain in order to see a movie in the middle of January, I thought the movie I was going to see would have a murder. That is, until Wife turned to me on the couch as I was getting my things ready to go and said, “I don’t think the movie you’re going to see is going to have a murder.” What? “I think the movie you’re about to see is going to be about an old man who, through the persistence of a stubbornly cheerful neighbor, has his heart warmed.” I don’t want to see that. “I know.” It’s at that point that I went very quickly through the stages of grief, bartered with her to take my ticket, considered lying to my friends to avoid going altogether, considered just ditching the entire concept of seeing movies ever again, but ultimately, I figured, hey, we’re not certain there isn’t a murder, right? There could be? That would be a pretty good plot, as evidenced by all the other movies in which grumpy old men seem to crawl out of windows and/or solve murders!
Everyone in attendance was mildly embarrassed by this movie, but there is an exquisite awkwardness about being the fifth wheel of two couples who’ve come out to see an inspirational movie based on a popular best seller for moms because they think they’re supporting their friend’s one and only ever earnest movie pick in the entirety of their time knowing him. They all thought that I wanted to see this, I kept thinking as we found our seats, questioning everything that I thought they understood about me. No one asked for clarification or follow up. Someone even mentioned they had had this on their radar! I made a mental note to stop asking his opinions about movies or anything else. And in that moment of really severe introspection about the closeness that I thought I had with these so-called Friends who had agreed to see this movie without a second thought, it began.
The plot of Otto is pretty simple: it’s a series of improbably foiled suicide attempts interspersed with trauma plot flashbacks and bookended with death. “It was almost like the director was taking a dare,” one Friend put it, describing how many different minoritized and victimized identities the film had found a way to include in the story without logic or care. The film is a rainbow coalition of disability, mental illness, hard working immigrants, cancer, and pregnancy mishaps. It is constructed in such a way to inflict as much pain as possible on the viewer depending on their particular sensitivities, but there is the general impression of an emotional dragnet, a trawling for every possible twinge that can be extracted. Ultimately, why does a former student who’s trans feel the need to retell his story to a man who seems wholly uninterested and unsympathetic to his plight? Why does the nice Central American couple next door waste more than a few seconds on a man who is so thoroughly unpleasant even as he gruffly offers help? The answer is childcare in this country is so insanely difficult to obtain that they would sooner rely on the manic depressive next door to watch their two young daughters than hire help. But we’re straying from the most damning fact of this whole story, which is that there is no murder in this movie that should clearly be about an old man solving a mystery. Or, possibly the mystery is why the goody two-shoes who hounds others for not having the proper permitting on their dashboards would not store his gun properly in a safe?
Set comfortably in 2019 or maybe 2020, the movie gracefully pirouettes over the ravages of the pandemic, rather than engage with current events in any meaningful way. It helps that every minority that Otto meets is one of the “good ones,” with an infinite capacity for forgiveness and infinite patience for Otto’s shenanigans. If anyone had had an ounce of self respect, they might have ostracized Otto for his poor behavior early in the movie after literally years of poor boundaries. Why is he allowed to threaten to kill his neighbor’s dog when a stray cat attacks it without repercussions? Why can he accuse a young woman of being jam packed with diseases without having to apologize? And for what purpose do we learn that he avoided military service while less fortunate peers were shipped off to the meatgrinder in Vietnam?
Otto promised it would have a murder and then didn’t deliver. False advertising.
