A Man Called Ove
A MAN CALLED OVE, dark comedy, rated PG-13, in Swedish with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 2.5 chiles
The rewards of this Swedish film about a curmudgeonly old man — well, he’s fifty-nine, but he’s an old fifty-nine — are in the execution, not the concept. There’s very little here that reaches beyond the cliches of the old grouch gradually softened by exposure to children, cats, and other heartwarming elements.
But Rolf Lassgård, in the title role, does his best, and his best is almost good enough. In the early going, we see him storming around the little gated community where he lives, scolding everyone he meets for infractions against the rules and decorum of the place. When a couple of smarmy young managers ease him out of a job as railroad yard supervisor that he’s held for 43 years, he embraces the firing and goes home to kill himself.
Not much of a spoiler there. It all happens near the top of the show, and the suicide motif continues in predictable fashion, with each attempt interrupted by a doorbell or a ringing telephone or some other intrusion consistent with the spirit of a dark comedy that is not going to let its central character kill himself in the first reel. Visiting the gravestone of his dead wife, whom he has promised to join soon, he laments to her that killing yourself isn’t as easy as it looks.
Ove’s suicide attempts provide an opportunity for flashbacks, briefly to his seven-year-old self (Viktor Baagøe) and then to Ove as a young man (Filip Berg), as we explore how he got this way. We find him naturally shy and further closed off by tragedy but still a nice young man. When he meets Sonja (Ida Engvoll), the love of his life, he blossoms like a dandelion growing through the pavement.
Ove is the central character and engine of this film by Hannes Holm (adapted from a bestseller by Fredrik Backman), but the fuel that drives it is the women in the story. There’s Sonja, with her radiant big-toothed smile and her sunny disposition. And there’s Parvaneh (a wonderful Bahar Pars), the very pregnant Iranian immigrant who is Ove’s new neighbor. She presents a nonstick surface to his diatribes and insults and cultivates an unlikely friendship with the old coot.
By contrast, the other men in the story are there mostly as bookmarks, reference points in Ove’s journey to cantankerous old party, a journey that does not feel well connected. There’s Rune (Börje Lundberg), a stroke victim who was Ove’s only friend until they had a falling-out over the relative superiority of Saab to Volvo; there is the slimy young creep from a health services company; and there are assorted other denizens, grown and child, who make up the community.
“Fate is the sum total of our stupidity,” Ove observes. The old saws that drive this may be no more than we deserve, but their sum total is appealing and sometimes funny, and they have propelled the movie into Sweden’s Foreign Language Oscar nomination. — Jonathan Richards