Review: In ‘A Man Called Ove,’ Don’t Let That Scowl Fool You
By Glenn Kenny, New York Times Nov 29, 2016, 10:55PM
Rolf Lassgard, foreground, in the Swedish film “A Man Called Ove.” Credit Music Box Films
Sweden’s official entry for a best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards proves that Swedish pictures can be just as sentimental and conventionally heartwarming as Hollywood ones. Granted, few Hollywood films would deign to tell the story of a protagonist’s life through a series of flashbacks brought on by unsuccessful suicide attempts. But still.
Adapted by the writer and director Hannes Holm from a best-selling novel by Fredrik Backman, “A Man Called Ove” begins with its title character (a convincingly gruff Rolf Lassgard) losing the railroad job that he’s worked at for more than 40 years. Lumbering, frowning and curmudgeonly, Ove trudges back to the small gated community that he watches over like a hawk and determines to join his recently deceased wife by hanging himself. He is interrupted by new neighbors, a young family whose matriarch, Parvenah (Bahar Pars), becomes both a conscience for and disciple of the old crank.
Ove (Rolf Lassgard) visits his wife's grave in a scene from 'A Man Called Ove'
Slightly won over by Parvenah’s delicious Middle Eastern cooking, Ove softens into the mensch viewers will no doubt figure him for from the first frame. (Things really pick up when Ove reluctantly adopts a fluffy Persian cat with striking blue eyes.) Beneath the twists and turns of this ordinary man’s life story there’s a casual social history of Sweden in the last half of the 20th century. In a way, “A Man Called Ove” is also kind of a message picture, its finale insisting that the best route to cultural continuity is community, not ethnic exclusivity. Good-hearted stuff, to be sure.
“A Man Called Ove” is rated PG (Parents cautioned) for raw crankiness.
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