A Hologram for the King

The two Toms – writer/director Tykwer and actor/co-producer Hanks – team up again on a film that should face better commercial prospects than their last co-effort, Cloud Atlas. Based on Dave Eggers’ 2012 novel (a National Book Award finalist), A Hologram for the King is a seriocomic movie about lost American dreams and its waylaid, middle-aged dreamers. It’s two-thirds of a good movie, until the third act gets mired in a redemptive love story.

The surreal opening sequence offers grand hope for the kind of visual and narrative audacity that brought Tykwer to international attention with Run Lola Run. Hanks’ Alan Clay bounds into view singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” in front of carnivalesque sets before strapping into a roller coaster. The divorced salesman, who was once a great success, can no longer afford to pay his daughter’s college tuition, and he grabs on to his new assignment – selling holographic teleconferencing technology to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – as though it were a life preserver. But that roller coaster, like the ugly cyst that appears on his back, are part of the film’s metaphor-heavy landscape. Alan is one of the victims of globalization and the American recession of the last decade, after, ironically, having been one of its progenitors. He arrives at the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade, a towering edifice in the flat, empty desert that is the foothold for a planned megacity to be completed by the year 2025. Yet Alan’s team of young IT professionals is holed up in a nearby tent, and struggling with the lack of meals and air conditioning and – egads! – iffy wifi. Alan’s attempts to straighten things out and act managerial have zero effect: His Saudi Arabian assignment quickly becomes a salesman’s version of Waiting for Godot as he bides time waiting for meetings that never occur – nor seem likely to ever occur. Stasis becomes its own subject here.

Hanks is perfect in the central role, drawing on both his dramatic and comic acting skills. Yet greater depth might be desirable at several junctures in the story. Alan’s relationship with his daughter (Fairaway) remains sketchy except for his guilt about her tuition money; an emergent friendship with his driver (Black), hints at complexity but retreats instead of digging deeper; Alan’s past as the salesman who sold Schwinns to China, inadvertently paving the way for globalization, cries out for more detail; his contact with a Danish executive (Knudsen) who provides him with contraband hooch and easy sexual opportunity is never fully explored; and his “follow-up” with the female doctor (Choudhury) who lances his cyst is straight out of Screenplays 101, despite the cultural dichotomies that make relations between the sexes so complicated for a Westerner in Saudi Arabia. Still, these are not grievous oversights, but rather things that might peck at your brain during the final act’s disappointing shift in gears. As far as desert mirages go, you might as well be salmon fishing in the Yemen.