It’s not too late for love in ‘A Man Called Ove’
Grouchy old Ove makes W.C. Fields look like Fred Rogers: He hates dogs, cats, kids and foreigners. It’s never a beautiful day in Mr. Ove’s neighborhood. He’s the neighbor from hell — a grump who was dumped as head of his block association and is still furious about it, still patrolling his little bailiwick to enforce rules everybody else ignores. He’s George Zimmerman without the gun.
We’ve seen the likes of him in a half-dozen or so Walter Matthau films, but his Swedish incarnation in “A Man Called Ove” is the seriocomic character with a more serio than comic back story. And front story, for that matter:
Ove (Rolf Lassgard) has just been forced to retire after 43 years with the railroad. In the opening, he’s buying flowers to put on his beloved wife’s grave — and fussing about the merchant’s refusal to honor a discount coupon. He sees no point in going on and, in the second sequence, makes his first-butnot-last suicide attempt.
Can’t a man even kill himself without interruption? Evidently not. A pregnant Persian woman, Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), and her boisterous family are in the process of moving into the house opposite his. Their first-but-not-last outrage is to back into his mailbox. Friendly gifts of cooked rice and
saffron are hardly appreciated (“What’s wrong with meat and potatoes?”).
Misery hates company, especially when it’s bureaucrats from the local council or the wife of his ex-friend Rune — the one who defeated him for block president (and drove a Volvo instead of a Saab). Rune is now in a vegetative state, and when his elderly wife asks Ove’s help with a broken radiator he replies, “Buy an extra blanket.”
How anti-social and illtempered is he? He hisses at cats — rather than vice versa — in a running gag involving a cute feline who declines to run away.
Director-writer Hannes Holm stacks the emotional deck in a melodramatic screenplay based on Fredrik Backman’s best-selling novel. But Mr. Lassgard in the title role and Ida Engvoll as late wife Sonja pull it off. A youthful flashback of Ove’s firstever visit to a restaurant sweetly contrasts his humorless simplicity with her whimsical depth. She’s an intellectual gal, reading “The Master and Margarita.”
Ove doesn’t know from Bulgakov — then or now. He’s just poignantly smelling her clothes in the closet.
Can a bitter retiree, who’s given up on life, find something resembling friendship or love?
This feel-good film suggests that (unassisted) suicide is not so painless, even if it brings on many changes. Or, as Parvaneh puts it: “Ove, you’re amazingly bad at dying.” Opens today at the Regent Square theater only.