A Man Called Otto(2022)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

SHORT VERSION:
Otto eventually stops trying to kill himself, having come to the conclusion that Sonya wants him to keep living because of how he has been having certain important memories of her during his suicide attempts that end up making him unable to go through with them. He also – with the aid of social media journalist Shari Kenzie – saves his semi-estranged friends Reuben and Anita from losing their home to the Dye & Merika real estate company by publicly exposing how the company illegally gained access to Anita’s medical records as part of their scheme to force them out of their home (and how they were also planning to eventually do the same thing to Otto, since one of their agents indirectly told Otto that the company knew about his heart condition).

Over the next three years, Otto becomes more sociable and grows closer to his neighbors, especially Marisol, her husband Tomaso, and their children. However, one February morning, when Marisol and Tomaso notice that Otto has not shoveled his walk after a recent snowfall, they go into his house to check on him and find him lying dead on his bed, having succumbed to heart failure the night before. Marisol then reads a letter that Otto had left for her, where he tells her that he is bequeathing his house, all of its contents, his truck, his cat, and all the money he has in his bank accounts to her and her family. She arranges a simple funeral for him at his request, and at the reception, we find out that she has started the Sonya Anderson Youth Crisis Fund for troubled teenagers in Otto’s and Sonya’s honor.

LONG VERSION:
As Otto (Tom Hanks) goes from one failed attempt at suicide to the next, he develops a bond with the Mendes family – Marisol (Mariana Treviño), Tomaso (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), Abbie (Alessandra Perez), and Luna (Christiana Montoya) (particularly Marisol) – and helps them in various ways, and he also befriends Malcolm (Mack Bayda), a transgender teenager who was a student of his late wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller), and who was fully supported by her when he came out as transgender. Otto also reluctantly adopts a stray cat that has been hanging around him. One day, Otto goes to a train station intending to kill himself by jumping off the platform into the path of any oncoming train that passes by, but shortly after he sees one approaching in the distance, a nearby elderly man suffers an apparent heart attack and falls from the platform down onto the train tracks. With a bunch of people recording the proceedings over their phones, Otto gets down onto the tracks and saves the man by helping him up and then getting him back onto the platform with the aid of a few bystanders. He then decides to stay on the tracks so the train can hit him like he planned, but suddenly, a memory of Sonya enters his mind (just like in a past suicide attempt) telling him to “take (her) hand”, and he ends up accepting the hand of another man on the platform and gets pulled up to safety just before the train can strike him. Otto gets applauded for his heroics, but he pays no attention to any of it and just heads back home.

A couple of days later, Otto is paid a visit from Shari Kenzie (Kelly Lamor Wilson), a social media journalist, who tells him that she has an online series called Everyday Heroes and wants to talk to him about the man he saved at the train station, having tracked him down through watching one of the bystanders’ videos and reading a comment about him from someone in the comments section who recognized him. However, though Otto grudgingly takes one of her business cards, he is not interested in talking to her at all, and he ends up locking himself inside of his house with the intention of staying there until she goes away. Later on, Marisol comes by and lets him know that Shari has left, and after Otto comes back out so he can finish his regular neighborhood rounds, Marisol walks alongside him and talks to him. She tells him that she wants to do something for him as a way of saying “thank you” for doing so much for her and her family, and she offers to help him clean out his house and pack up Sonya’s coats and shoes in the front hall, explaining that it could help him move on from her death. Otto responds to this by telling her that he doesn’t want to move on, but Marisol tells him that Sonya will always be with him, and he still has a life to live. She then starts to talk about how her own mother gave up on life after the death of her father, but this causes Otto to lose his patience with her and lash out at her. He then growls that he doesn’t want to clear Sonya from his life because she was everything to him, and there was nothing before her and nothing after, but Marisol replies that SHE is something. He then spots the unnamed agent from the Dye & Merika real estate company (Mike Birbiglia) about to leave the neighborhood in his car following another visit that he has made to the home of Otto’s semi-estranged friends Reuben (Peter Lawson Jones) and Anita (Juanita Jennings), so he stops him and confronts him about how he left the street’s gates wide open. Things devolve into an argument between them, during which Otto’s heart condition (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM for short) starts to act up, and the agent tells Otto that he really shouldn’t be living alone before indirectly revealing that he and his company know about his heart problem when he tells him to look after his heart. When Otto demands for him to tell him what he knows about his heart, the agent just drives off. Marisol then approaches Otto and asks him if he is okay, but all he does is yell at her to close the exit gate before heading back into his house and locking the door. As he sits and becomes overwhelmed by memories of when he made a crib for his and Sonya’s unborn son, a concerned and scared Marisol comes knocking at his door and living room window begging him to open the door and talk to her, but he completely ignores her.

He spends the rest of the daylight hours making preparations for another suicide attempt in his living room, but just as he is getting ready to do it, he recalls the bus crash that he and the pregnant Sonya got caught up in while they were returning home from a vacation they took to Niagara Falls, which resulted in Sonya miscarrying their son and being rendered paraplegic (we later find out that the crash happened because the bus had defective brake lines and the bus company never had them fixed). He then has a vision of Sonya sometime after they returned home from the hospital telling him that that is enough now; she knows that he is angry and sad, and so is she, but now, they have to live. He is then forced to abandon his suicide attempt when Malcolm comes knocking at his door, and he asks Otto if he can stay here for the night because his father kicked him out of the house for being transgender. Otto agrees to it and lets him sleep on the sofa in Sonya’s old study.

The next morning, after Otto finishes making his rounds with some assistance from Malcolm and Jimmy (Cameron Britton), another neighborhood resident and acquaintance, he finds out from Jimmy that Dye & Merika are coming to Reuben’s and Anita’s house this afternoon to move Reuben into an assisted living facility (earlier in the film, Anita told Otto that the people at Dye & Merika had recently told her that she and Reuben had to move out of their house, and this decision came right on the heels of her son Chris – who had been talking back and forth with the company lately – contacting her and telling her that, having come to believe that she can no longer take care of Reuben [an unresponsive, wheelchair-bound stroke survivor], she should move into a retirement home and Reuben should be sent to the aforementioned facility). Otto grumbles aloud that the company convinced Anita to sell her house, but Jimmy informs him that the company actually made the deal with Chris. He explains that, after Dye & Merika found out last year that Anita had Parkinson’s disease, they tracked Chris down and told him about it. Chris thus convinced his mother to give him power of attorney in case if she got worse, so Dye & Merika made the deal with Chris to buy the house. Otto is surprised at the news of Anita’s diagnosis, having never learned about it until now, and he tells Jimmy that that can’t be right because Anita would’ve told Sonya about it and then Sonya would’ve told him. Jimmy informs him that Reuben and Anita didn’t want him or Sonya to know about it because they were dealing with enough on their plate at the time (undoubtedly referring to Sonya’s battle with cancer that ultimately claimed her life). Realizing that Dye & Merika might have illegally gotten access to Anita’s medical records to find out her condition and then used both that and Chris as part of a scheme to take her and Reuben’s house away from them, Otto visits Anita and tells her that he needs to see everything that she has ever received from Dye & Merika, as well as her and Reuben’s medical records and a copy of the power of attorney. After she goes to get him everything he asked for, Otto goes up to Reuben and apologizes for how he has behaved towards him all these years before promising him that he will sort this whole mess out for him and Anita.

After Anita gives Otto all of the documents, Otto pays Marisol a visit and tells her that he needs to use her cell phone because his phone is currently disconnected. Though she ultimately obliges him after he explains what Dye & Merika are about to do to Reuben and Anita, she first chastises Otto for shutting her out and scaring her yesterday, then dresses him down for his overall grumpy attitude, telling him that he carries on like he thinks that his life is so hard because everyone is an idiot and he has to do everything on his own. However, neither he nor anyone else can do everything on their own, and he should be happy that someone was trying to help him get through a bad day, even if that someone is an idiot. After Marisol hands him her cell phone, Otto decides to tell her all about the bus crash that he and Sonya were involved in and what it did to Sonya, and then he explains that Sonya remained in the hospital for three months before she was finally allowed to come home. Upon their return, Dye & Merika had already started construction on a new housing development next to their neighborhood featuring a bunch of condominiums, a community center, and some walkways, and none of them were made wheelchair accessible. He remarks that the builders could’ve changed their plans, but the necessary laws were not in place back then, and they just didn’t care. He became very angry about this, and during a meeting that happened sometime later between the Birchwood Homeowners’ Association (of which he was the chairman) and representatives from Dye & Merika about this new housing development, Otto took great offense to a comment that one of the reps made about Sonya’s paraplegic state and roughed him up a little before Reuben stepped in and separated them, and this incident resulted in him getting voted out as chairman. Otto very much wanted to stop at nothing to obliterate Dye & Merika, the builders, the bus company, and even the person who drove the bus, but Sonya told him that they had to keep living and persuaded him to give up his desire to seek vengeance. He then tells Marisol that Sonya died six months ago from cancer, and he had been trying to kill himself so he could join her, which is why he had his phone disconnected. However, he has now come to accept that Sonya wants him to keep living. He then takes a look at Shari Kenzie’s business card and calls the number on it.

That afternoon, Otto is seen sitting outside Reuben’s and Anita’s house when the unnamed Dye & Merika agent shows up with a group of people from the company’s Eldercare Division to collect Reuben. Anita steps out of the house and confronts the agent, defiantly telling him that he is not taking her husband or her house away from her and that she wants Reuben to stay here with her for the rest of his life. When the agent asks her who is going to take care of Reuben when she is no longer able to and who is going to take care of her, Jimmy comes out from behind Anita with his phone recording the Dye & Merika group and answers that he will take care of them both and he will do it for as long as they need. Just after the agent brings up that Chris decided that his parents aren’t fit enough to be here on their own anymore, he is surprised by Shari Kenzie, who has come with Malcolm acting as her cameraman and is doing a livestream of her show. Shari brings up to both the agent and her audience that Chris lives in Japan and has been estranged from his parents for the last ten years, so he would have no idea how his parents are doing except for what Dye & Merika had told him. She then talks to the agent about how his company told Chris that Anita had Parkinson’s disease, but Anita never told anybody about her diagnosis, and she adds that Otto told her that Dye & Merika know details about his private health records as well. After she asks the agent how he and his company have been getting illegal access to the medical records of seniors, the entire Dye & Merika group immediately head back to their vehicles and leave the neighborhood. As they go, Shari tells her viewers that she first uploaded Anita’s and Chris’ story an hour ago, and dozens of people have already said that Dye & Merika forced them out of their homes.

Otto is then shown sitting next to Reuben in his house, and after Otto remarks how good it felt to see the Dye & Merika crew give up so easily, Reuben shows some real responsiveness for the first time since his stroke when he looks at Otto, gives him a slight smile, and opens his hand for him to take, which he does. However, as Otto is walking back to his house with his cat shortly afterwards, his heart condition suddenly gets the better of him, and he falls to the ground unconscious. Marisol – who is standing outside Anita’s and Reuben’s house with Tomaso, Anita, and Jimmy and being interviewed by Shari – sees Otto lying motionless on his back and shouts for someone to call an ambulance for him. When Otto awakens in the hospital, he finds Marisol standing next to him, and when a Dr. Ellis (Nayab Hussain) comes into the room soon after, she tells Marisol that Otto had listed her as his next of kin (referring to her as his “niece”) and then she enlightens her about his HCM. After Marisol has a good laugh over the idea of Otto’s heart being too big, she suddenly goes into labor, so Dr. Ellis leaves to call an obstetrician for her. In the next scene, a party is going on at Marisol’s house celebrating the birth of her new son, Marco, and Otto shows up and gifts her the crib that he had originally made for his own son.

Over the next three years, Otto becomes more sociable and grows closer to the Mendes family and his other neighbors. Also, Marisol and Tomaso help him pack up all of Sonya’s old clothes and give them to charity, and he gives Malcolm his car and buys a new truck (Malcolm had told him about how he had been saving up for a car and wanted to own a Volkswagen vehicle, so – out of a dislike for foreign automobile companies – he decided to give Malcolm his Chevrolet to keep him from buying that). After a couple of incidents where his heart gives him some trouble, he types up a letter for Marisol, puts it in an envelope, and leaves it on his bedroom dresser.

One February morning, Tomaso opens his front door to get a package that a UPS delivery person has just left on his doorstep, but when he looks across the street at Otto’s house, he notices that Otto has not shoveled his walk like he usually does in the morning after every snowfall. When he informs Marisol about this, she takes a look for herself, and immediately sensing that something is wrong, she tells Tomaso to get their key for Otto’s front door before they both hurry over to his house. After they get in, they look around for Otto until Marisol finds him lying dead on his bed, having succumbed to heart failure the night before. Tomaso then comes into the room, and after seeing what has become of Otto, he notices the letter to Marisol on the dresser and hands it to her. In the letter, Otto explains to Marisol that he simply died from his HCM and didn’t do anything stupid, and he wrote this letter a while ago because he knew that his condition would get him in the end and he wanted to plan ahead. He then informs Marisol that he is bequeathing his house, all of its contents, his truck (which he is only trusting her to drive because Tomaso isn’t a good driver), his cat, and all the money he has in his bank accounts to her and her family. At his request, she arranges a simple funeral for him, which is attended by her and her family, as well as Reuben, Anita, Malcolm, Jimmy, Shari, and several others who knew him. At the reception, we find out that Malcolm and Jimmy are now doing Otto’s daily neighborhood rounds, and Marisol has started the Sonya Anderson Youth Crisis Fund for troubled teenagers in Otto’s and Sonya’s honor.

The movie ends with the camera focusing on Otto’s and Sonya’s shared headstone in the cemetery.