Why do the characters turn sour? What is behind that always grumpy and square neighbor regarding the rules of community coexistence, who long ago decided to go through life fulfilling everything to the letter, but without adding the slightest amount of kindness or courtesy? When they are alone, and they usually are, what do they do, and what and who do they think about? We’ve all known someone like this. But we still haven’t stopped to think about them.
The worst neighboor in the world, film directed by Marc Forster with Tom Hanks as the protagonist, in an unusual character in his career, delves into one of those personalities telling his present, his past and his uncertain future in a dramatic comedy tone for all audiences. She is personable, even pretty, and is well grounded around certain fashionable social themes that help us build not only a sour and sullen human being, but also a certain society. It only has one problem, and not a minor one for contemporary American cinema, although perhaps insignificant for a good part of the spectators who get their ticket: it is (almost) exact to the Swedish one. A man named Ove, by Hannes Holm, the 2015 film he covers.
The Oscar for the best film of last year as a symptom. No longer from the general lack of imagination to compose new stories that caress the public without having to resort to recent world successes. Above all, for awarding a film like CODE, with very similar internal and external essences that The worst neighboor in the world, as the highlight of that year. and there is the remake of the Spanish champions to corroborate a practice that, while not being new by any means, has become more acute for a clear reason: American cinema for adults, made by the big production firms, with social, cultural and moral themes of interest, and original, is a wasteland
Forster, specialist in cinema for tears since Discovering Neverland (2004), drives his new version with the reliability of a good American car. And the parallelism is not accidental, since it is in the character of the protagonist, the Ove of the original film and the Otto of the present one. A kind of automobile nationalism (in the Swedish one it was a Saab, naturally), which extends to an obvious hatred of immigration, and which in the story brings together a subtle metaphor: the engine of life has broken down until it is given up for dead and Just thinking about suicide.
The misanthrope played by Hanks, who talks to his wife’s grave like John Wayne did in John Ford’s movies, runs into a very nice Latino family (in the Swedish one it was Iranian) who, first of all, saves him from keeping him company soon. to his wife in the first sequences. The extension of a life that, with new and spontaneous neighbors, may come to soften his rictus and understand why his character blackened. And, as in Charles Dickens’ Mr. Scrooge, now that we are at Christmas, the end of love is at its base, accompanied by loneliness, conceit and stubbornness.
Narrated in two eras —with Truman Hanks, Tom’s youngest son, as a debutant actor—, through extensive flashbacks in which the beginnings of the romance are portrayed with a very good tempo in the narration and editing, The worst neighboor in the world he only reels with the typical honeyed ditty at one of the climactic moments. The rest is well constructed and interpreted. It has a good engine. A mechanism, yes, copied from a previous film.
The worst neighboor in the world
Direction: Marc Forster.
Performers: Tom Hanks, Mariana Trevino, Truman Hanks, Rachel Keller.
Gender: comedy. USA, 2022.
Duration: 126 minutes.
Premiere: December 28.
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