Butler's Cinema Scene

“A MAN CALLED OVE” My rating: B

116 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Black comedy and heart-tugging sentiment are strange bedfellows. It’s the rare film (“Harold and Maude” and “Bad Santa” come to mind) that can stir them together without curdling the meal.

To that short list we can now add “A Man Called Ove,”  writer/director Hannes Holm’s amusing and surprisingly moving adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s international best-seller.

Basically it’s a droll character study of an old grump who, in the wake of his beloved wife’s death, is bent on suicide.

But every time crusty Ove (Rolf Lassgard) is about to do the deed — his proposed methods range from noose to shotgun — he is interrupted by one of his neighbors with some sort of emergency that must be seen to. (A man can’t even kill himself in peace, goddammit.)

For though he is a royal pain who patrols his housing estate every morning, anally obsessed with violations of the community ordinances, Ove possesses skills that his hapless fellow humans lack.

He’s a handyman with a garage full of tools,  a car mechanic  capable of bringing the automotively deceased back to life.  (A loyal Saab customer, he breaks with his oldest friend when the other fellow has the temerity to purchase a BMW.)

He’s a firm hand at the wheel, a big plus since he seems always to be taking someone to the hospital (though he does cover the car seats with newspapers, lest his riders befoul his precious upholstery).

Bahar Pars, Rolf Lassgard

“A Man Called Ove” unfolds in both the present and the past.

In the here and how Ove is contemptuous of just about everyone who crosses his path.

Like the  family that has moved in across the way.  The mother, Parvaneh  (Bahar Pars), is an Iranian married to a  Swedish doofus. She infuriates Ove by refusing to be repulsed by his sour disposition — instead she finds him amusing. She seems to know there’s a softy hiding somewhere inside that rough exterior.

Ove feuds with officials of the local homes association. He helps a pimply-faced teen spiff up an old bicycle for his girlfriend — not because Ove is charitable or friendly but because he likes to see a job well done and it’s pretty obvious the kid is a mechanical spastic.  He finds himself sharing his home with a mangy tomcat who, much to his disgust, has adopted him. Later on he begrudgingly lends a bedroom to a kid who’s been kicked out of his house for being gay.

A good chunk of the film, though, consists of flashbacks to Ove’s childhood and early adulthood. These help explain his core personality — pragmatic, unsentimental, unimaginative. But they also introduce the important character of Sonja (Ida Engvoll), the school teacher who saw something beautiful beyond Ove’s social awkwardness and narrow-mindedness.  Despite tragedies that befell them, Ove (played as a young man by Filip Berg) and Sonja had something beautiful.

No wonder he doesn’t want to live without her.

Filmmaker Holm strikes just the right balance here. The film is funny, but the laughs are never cheap. The pathos in Ove’s story emerges slowly, sneaking up instead of slapping us about the ears. Much of there movie is borderline absurdist, but the feelings it evokes are absolutely real.

| Robert W. Butler