Old Yorker

En man som heter Ove

Hannes Holm (2015)

It’s adapted from a 2012 Swedish novel of the same name by Fredrik Backman but the set-up immediately brings to mind the Jack Nicholson protagonists of As Good as It Gets (1997) and About Schmidt (2002):  fifty-nine-year-old Ove Lindahl (Rolf Lassgård) is a combination of scowling misanthrope and grieving widower.  (He’s thus a close relation too of the Bill Murray character in St Vincent (2014) – a movie so unmemorable that this didn’t occur to me while I was watching A Man Called Ove.)  Holm’s film is more conventional and sentimental than As Good as It Gets and About Schmidt.  An American or British dramedy of this stripe might succeed commercially in indigenous markets but no more than that.  Imagine what the reaction of our critics and arthouse audiences would have been to the sweet, concluding, post-mortem reunion of Ove and his wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll) if they’d been speaking English up to this point.  Yet A Man Called Ove was nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.  It’s another illustration of the mystifying, elevating magic of cinema subtitles.

We learn at the start that Sonja has recently died and that Ove talks to her on regular visits to the cemetery.  We can be sure that grief and the fact that he was ousted as chair of the residents’ association – by his old sparring partner Rune (Börje Lundberg), now speechless and wheelchair-bound after a stroke – isn’t the whole explanation of Ove’s martinet aggression towards his neighbours.  (He chides visitors, as well as the people and pet animals who live on the housing estate; although he’s a stickler for the letter of the law, he has a particular animus towards authority figures  – ‘the white shirts’.)  Once flashbacks reveal Ove to have been a somewhat Aspergic but essentially benign and content young man (Filip Berg), we wait for the explanation of how he soured into a harsh curmudgeon.  We wait too for his equally inevitable reconnection with his fellow humans, his realisation that the people to whom he’s giving a hard time like and respect him.   The wait isn’t short – A Man Called Ove runs 113 minutes.  It’s fortunate that, as well as being seriously formulaic, the film is entertaining.

It turns out that Ove and Sonja, travelling abroad while she was pregnant with their first child, were involved in a road accident.  As a result, Sonja lost the baby and was left paralysed from the waist downwards.  Ove’s penchant for writing letters of complaint and insistence on rules and regulations credibly reflect longstanding character traits reinforced by the circumstances and consequences of the accident.  But Hannes Holm’s script is more a scorecard than a screenplay in the way it tots up illustrations of the practical humanity that underlie Ove’s ornery personality.  He develops a wary, combative friendship with Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), a tenacious Iranian immigrant neighbour, and becomes de facto grandfather to her two daughters.  (Parvaneh is also carrying a third new life inside her.)  He takes in the stray cat he once bellowed at.  He lets Mirsad (Poyan Karimi), a young Muslim, stay in his apartment after Mirsad has come out as gay and, as a result, been thrown out by his father.  We get hefty clues from an early stage that Ove is suffering from a cardiac problem:  this is eventually identified by a doctor as ‘a heart that’s too big’ – a symbolic-psychological diagnosis, as well as a physiological one.

Ove tries and fails repeatedly to commit suicide, thanks either to interruptions at the crucial moment or to faulty equipment.  He tries at first to hang himself with blue rope that snaps.   This provides one of the black-comedy highlights, when he complains to the shop where he bought the rope that he wants his money back (‘It’s meant to be all purpose’).  Yet Ove is also a lifesaver.  As a young man, he’s the only person brave enough to enter a blazing house and rescue the people inside it.  In the present, a railway commuter faints and falls onto the track as a train approaches – Ove drags the man to safety before taking the opportunity to end his own life there and then, until he’s dissuaded from doing so.  This is one of the film’s strongest moments.  It somewhat revitalises the running gag of attempted suicide (as much a cliché of this kind of material as the monologues at the wife’s grave).  It also distressingly evokes the death of Ove’s father (Stefan Gödicke), a manual worker on the local railway, who gets so excited by his son’s school-leaving exam results that he’s looking at the piece of paper listing them when he should have been heeding an oncoming train.

The nature of that accident is too horrifying for this film to bear convincingly.  Hannes Holm seems to think this death is good just for a bit of dramatic impact – he then shows the distraught Ove holding the bloodstained paper with the exam results on it – but it’s impossible to believe the son wouldn’t be lastingly traumatised and guilt-ridden by how his father died.  This isn’t Holm’s only misjudgment.  When the commuter falls onto the line, the onlookers on the platform with Ove don’t just do nothing to help – one of them takes a photo on their phone, a detail that suggests the director’s opinion of people is even lower than that of his protagonist.  In its last ten minutes or so, A Man Called Ove suddenly lurches into life-and-death overdrive.  Ove collapses and is taken into hospital.   While Parvaneh is visiting him there, her waters break.  Ove recovers to enjoy the celebrations of the baby’s birth before his oversized heart gives out.  The church for his funeral service is packed.  Holm closes up on Ove in his coffin and reprises the moment of his first meeting with Sonja in a railway carriage – this time as an afterlife encounter.

Although Ove’s age of fifty-nine is made specific, this is doubly puzzling.  Rolf Lassgård was sixty when he made the film but has been given the appearance of a considerably older man.  (The make-up team for A Man Called Ove was also Oscar-nominated, though you sometimes see the line of the skullcap prosthetic Lassgård is wearing.)  Early on in the present-day part of the narrative, Ove is told his services are no longer required at the company where he’s worked for, according to the suits/white shirts who want rid of him, forty-three years.  This doesn’t square with what we get from the flashbacks.  When he first meets Sonja, who’s training to be a teacher, Ove has the same menial job that his father had; Sonja encourages him to enrol for engineering studies and in due course he gets a degree.  He must be twenty-something when he graduates; add on forty-three years and he should be in his mid-sixties.  If he were, Rolf Lassgård might not look so prematurely geriatric.

The imposing Lassgård, best known to British audiences as one of the incarnations of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, is a deliberate actor but he gives Ove’s anger considerable force – the hero’s story is cutely contrived but at least the man that Lassgård brings to life isn’t innocuous.   Even so, I looked forward increasingly to the flashbacks to Ove’s courtship and early marriage.  Filip Berg is taking and individual as the younger Ove:  you can see why Sonja is intrigued by, and attracted to, his odd blend of quiet intensity and naïve charm.  Ida Engvoll is a shade too aware of the camera but she’s radiantly pretty; the hope and delight that Sonja gives Ove crystallise in Engvoll’s vital eyes and smile.  Ove also appears briefly in the flashbacks as a seven-year-old child, played by Viktor Baagøe, who has a gentle eccentricity.  The best part of Gaute Storaas’s music is a melancholy martial refrain that seems almost a pastiche of the Handel Sarabande (the Barry Lyndon theme).  Elsewhere, the score is more twinkly and generic and, as used by Holm, emotionally tautologous.  There are more than enough jokes about the relative merits of Saabs and Volvos.

13 July 2017