OVP: A Man Called Ove (2016)

Film: A Man Called Ove (2016)
Stars: Rolf Lassgard, Bahar Pars, Filip Berg, Ida Engvoll
Director: Hannes Holm
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Foreign Language Film-Sweden, Makeup & Hairstyling)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Sweden has made something of a cottage industry in recent years with the Best Makeup category, taking a trio of nominations in the past five years.  The only one of those films to gain another citation at the Oscars was A Man Called Ove, which at the time was the first Swedish film in twelve years to be nominated in the category.  I'm nearly done watching the 2016 Oscar Viewing Project movies (I'll be going to this year next I've decided after we finish up the 2015 awards in the next six weeks), and as a result I got to see A Man Called Ove, one of three nominated films from that year that I had been avoiding like the plague; the OVP is its own blessing and curse, giving movies that I both yearn to see and dread.  Ove, which I've randomly returned twice to Netflix to get a more intriguing movie, was the latter, though after seeing it I shouldn't have dreaded it so much.  It's not a good movie, but it's hardly an egregiously bad one, even if I don't really think it deserved either of its actual nominations.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Ove (Lassgard in the present, Berg as a young man), a cantankerous coot who, after he is pushed out at his company, decides he wants to die like his wife Sonja (Engvoll).  The problem for Ove is that he is really, really bad at killing himself.  It's not a lot of movies that could get away with a running gag where the main character tries to commit suicide to comic effect, but A Man Called Ove is very much a Swedish creation in its humor (I am leery to believe this will work with the announced remake starring Tom Hanks, but we'll see), so it never feels tasteless.  While he's trying to kill himself, we see that his life is becoming fuller, befriending the neighbors who abandoned him after the souring of his attitude post his wife's death, as well as learn what brought him to this point in his life through flashbacks.  The film ends with Ove finding purpose after losing his wife, and eventually dying not at his own hand, but because his heart is literally too big.

The film's sentimentality is most of its undoing.  The "unlikely friendship" angle with the neighbor Parvaneh (Pars) manages to largely avoid the racial misgivings of something like Green Book, but it's still so sugary I felt like I needed to put down my ice cream cone as it felt redundant.  The movie's modern scenes, trying to assemble a crew of random people surely would have worked better as a miniseries, and too often it feels like they're introducing a stereotype (like the fat guy losing weight or the random gay guy) just to have Ove thaw a little bit in his demeanor to them.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing (it's sometimes nice just to be pleasant), but when you're trying to compete for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it's ridiculous that this got chosen over something like Elle.

But the film does have some redeeming factors.  I loved the work from Berg, by far the best in the cast, as a young Ove.  He's so desperately in love in a way you don't see enough in films.  He's a man who doesn't know how to express his feelings, and likely never will, and yet he shows his love through actions.  When Sonja tells him she's pregnant, he's so overcome he can't pronounce his happiness, but instead immediately starts building a cradle for the baby.  You understand through Berg's performance why an aging Ove can't stand a world without Sonja, even though Lassgard's performance never properly captures this fact.  The film received its Makeup nomination for Lassgard's work, transforming him into a completely different person, and they do so effectively, but I never really understood why.  Lassgard is quite famous in Sweden even though I'm by-and-large unfamiliar, so I'm sure it was impressive seeing him transform, but this also questions what the Best Makeup Oscar's point is.  I admittedly wouldn't question, say, Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise randomly turning into a completely different person, but I probably should-what's the purpose of it if it's only to transform the celebrity, not add to the film or performance?  Lassgard doesn't look much like Berg, so it's not adding story continuity, and as a result I just felt a bit lost into the reasoning behind this being such a makeup heavy film, even if the makeup itself is pretty good.  If the point of the category is simply to just have great Makeup, then why would it even need to be in a film?  As a result, I'm knocking a few points off of its ballot, but we'll get to how I ultimately shake out for that category once we kick off the 2016 OVP in May (and when I see the final film nominated that year in the next two weeks).