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A MAN CALLED OVE (EN MAN SOM HETER OVE)

Grade: B-

There’s a bit of a “Forest Gump” vibe to “A Man Called Ove,” a Swedish comedy-drama that ultimately aims for the heartstrings more than the funny bone. Mostly genial, but with a heavy dose of pathos, Hannes Holm’s adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s novel gets its share of laughs, but as it proceeds opts more for sighs of contentment and a few tears.

Ove (Rolf Lassgard) is a grieving widower who also happens to be resident nag of his little neighborhood, prowling the streets daily to remove improperly parked bikes, harangue folks with pets they don’t control and prohibit people from driving in the streets. Those were rules he made in concert with his long-time friend Rune (Borje Lundberg) when Ove was head of the neighborhood board, and he continues to enforce them even after he’s been ousted from the post by Rune, with whom he’d had a falling-out over the relative virtues of Saabs and Volvos. Their animosity continues even though Rune has been incapacitated with a stroke and his wife Anita (Chartarina Larsson) is struggling to keep him at home rather than seeing him hauled off to a public facility. To add to his problems, Ove has just been unceremoniously fired from his job of more than forty years.

All of Ove’s frustrations are soon to end, however, because he intends to commit suicide and join his wife, who though wheelchair-bound was a beloved teacher of disadvantaged youth. But though he’s handy in every other respect, Ove proves terrible at killing himself: all his attempts either fail or are inconveniently interrupted, mostly by the noisy neighbors who have just moved in across the road—talkative, intrusive, pregnant Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), her inept husband Patrik (Tobias Almborg), and their two young daughters (Nelly Jamarani and Zozan Akgun).

Much of the film has to do with Ove’s developing relationship with this family: they’ll borrow tools from him (that they’ll then induce him to use for them), and Parvaneh will reciprocate with home-made food. She’ll also ask him to give her driving lessons—something that eventually leads him to share some memories of years past with her.

Before the film is over, moreover, Ove will mellow in other ways. He’ll adopt a stray cat he’d previously shooed away from his backyard, and grow extraordinarily protective of it. He’ll not only become friendly toward a boy—one of his wife’s former students—whose bike he’d previously commandeered, but take in one of his friends, a young gay man who’d been thrown out of his house by his father. And he’ll come to the aid of Rune and Anita as well.

But Ove’s present-day story is only the beginning. Episodes in it—especially his suicide attempts—lead to frequent flashbacks about his youth, in which he’s played by Viktor Baagoe, detailing his relationship with his father (Stefan Godicke), and about his experiences as a young man (Filip Berg), in which we learn of his courtship of the lovely Sonja (Ida Engvoll) and his blissful life with her, even if it was occasionally touched by loss. The flashbacks make clear the ups and downs of Ove’s fifty-nine years, as well as a couple of incidents in which he acts heroically, though adamantly refusing any public recognition of his courage.

The early portions of “My Name of Ove,” in which the fellow is a cantankerous grouch, are easily the most amusing parts of the picture. Lassgard brings a gleeful acerbity to scenes in which Ove refuses to suffer those whom he considers fools gladly, and walks a fine line between tragedy and farce in playing his suicide attempts. But as Ove’s crusty exterior gradually thaws, the picture becomes less comic and much sappier. Pars’s insistent matter-of-factness makes the transition more palatable, but even she has difficulty coping with scenes like a hospital visit in which Ove and the children are thrown together and become pals despite the intervention of a troublesome volunteer dressed in clown garb. By the close, Ove has become a thoroughly benign, grandfatherly soul, a modern Scrooge or Grinch turned to kindness by simply reconnecting with people.

That’s the moral of the picture, of course—the idea that no man is an island. It’s a well-worn message delivered a mite too comfortably to make the picture anything more than a moderately engaging but extremely manipulative crowd-pleaser that starts off quirky but grows increasingly cloying. It looks very fine—Jan Olof’s production design, Camilla Lindblom’s costumes and Goran Hallberg’s cinematography work together to effect a creamy surface, especially in the flashbacks, though the score by Gaute Storaas can be awfully obvious at times.

By any objective standard “My Name is Ove” is an overly calculated mixture of comic whimsy and tearjerking sentiment. But like a piece of candy with a sour exterior and a sweet center, it’s a confection that many viewers will find agreeable.

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RACE

Grade: B-

“Stop thinking so much,” his wife Ruth (Shanice Banton) remarks to Jesse Owens (Stephan James) at one point in Stephen Hopkins’ biographical film about the legendary black track star who single-handedly (or single-footedly) dashed Adolf Hitler’s perverse belief in Aryan superiority at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “It’s not what you’re good at,” she adds to predictable audience laughs.

A similar opinion might be expressed—though in a less humorous way—about “Race.” The sledgehammer obviousness of the title’s twofold meaning only reinforces the picture’s lack of thoughtfulness and depth in favor of easy cinematic conventionality. The result is an uplifting sports story so old-fashioned that it seems more a product of World War II Hollywood than of the twenty-first century. Earnest and semi-hagiographical (like the recent “42” about Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League baseball’s racial barrier), it’s hard to dislike but at the same time easy to criticize for treating its subject in such glossy, sanitized terms.

The picture opens in 1933 as Owens, a genial Clevelander, is about to depart for Ohio State, leaving behind a baby daughter and his girlfriend Ruth, to whom he pledges to return. His natural speed catches the notice of campus track coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), a once-ranked runner himself whose team has fallen on hard times. What follows is essentially a tale of male bonding between the two, with Snyder becoming the mentor on whom Owens comes to depend all the way through his amazing four-gold-medal victory at the Olympics; Snyder even gets him a work-free job so he can make practice. The friendship is treated in semi-sitcom fashion, with lots of double takes and nods from Sudeikis, although he moderates his more overt comic inclinations for the most part.

As played by the likable James, who’s inhibited somewhat by the shallow script but is ingratiating nonetheless, young Owens endures racial taunts from members of the OSU football team but, under Snyder’s insistent tutelage, breaks no fewer than three world records at a 1935 Big Ten meet in Michigan. The script pauses to recount a career setback from a loss to another African-American sprinter, a fellow appropriately named Peacock (Shamier Anderson), and a rift in his relationship with Ruth caused by his dalliance with a rich girl (Chantel Riley) during a California trip, but his persistence finally pays off. By the end of the year he’s back to his winning ways and he and Ruth are married.

The Olympics are obviously the next step, but there are obstacles in Nazi policies toward minorities, Jews in particular, that led to calls for a boycott of the games. The picture emphasizes the last stage of the debate on the issue, where pro-boycott forces headed by principled Judge Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt, barely trying to act) are ultimately defeated by the group led by Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons, playing insufferably arrogant with relish). (The film does not, however, make clear that this final hurdle was overcome not at the American Olympic Committee, but the Amateur Athletic Union.) Even that does not settle matters, however, since Owens is pressured to refuse to participate by the NAACP, among others. Naturally, Snyder proves the deciding factor in his decision, though Peacock makes a contribution as well.

The picture culminates, of course, at the Olympics, where the film takes pains to depict not only Owens’ extraordinary accomplishments but also the racial bias he encounters from the Nazi regime—Hitler, who snubs him, and especially propaganda minister Josef Goebbels (grimly hateful Barnaby Metschurat), who has entrapped the greedy Brundage in a shady business deal he threatens to reveal to the world unless the American falls in line with his wishes. The loathsome Goebbels is, curiously, contrasted with director Leni Reifenstahl (Carice van Houten), who’s recording the games for her masterful propaganda film “Olympiad” and is characterized as a driven, open-minded artist often at odds with the cruelly bigoted minister. She’s only one of the obligatory “good Germans” on display here. Another is Carl “Luz” Long (David Kross), who not only advises Owens on the field in a famous display of sportsmanship but befriends him off it, expressing his disgust with the Nazi regime during a late night visit with the American. The picture closes, however, with a reminder that discrimination was prevalent in the United States during the thirties too, even against a man like Owens, who returned a national hero.

“Race” has the feel of a workmanlike cable docudrama—exactly what one might expect from a journeyman director like Hopkins, whose previous efforts include “Nightmare on Elm Street 5,” “Predator 2” and “Lost in Space” (though, to be fair, he also helmed the British TV mini-series “Traffic” and the cable film “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”). Of course it’s on a larger scale than a television production would be, with Peter Levy, the director’s regular cameraman, taking advantage of some impressive Canadian and German locations (like the Olympiastadion) and the visual effects teams giving the game sequences a sense of grandeur, with huge computer-generated crowds shouting in the stands. Overall the film is visually solid, with good contributions by production designer David Brisbin, art director Jean-Pierre Paquet and costume designer Mario Davignon. But John Smith’s editing sometimes comes across as a bit too leisurely, and Rachel Portman’s score too often sounds uncharacteristically bombastic.

This is a movie, frankly, that’s saved by its subject, an important tale of a twentieth-century sports triumph that also reveals the dark socio-political realities of the time. Like a bland history lesson, it could be more imaginatively told, but while “Race” may not win or place, it can be described as at least worthy of the bronze.