Tom Hanks does his reliable Everyman act once again in a quirky and snarky little movie about a businessman at the end of his tether.
The defining image in this curio from Cloud Atlas director Tom Tykwer is Tom Hanks as rumpled American businessman Alan Clay standing in full capitalist armour of business suit and briefcase at the edge of the Arabian Desert. The sun beats down and Clay is utterly lost. His whole life is unravelling around him as he loses the will to live during a make or break business trip.
He is in Saudi to flog new holographic projection software to a local king and Clay, at 55 years of age, is divorced and way past his mid-life crisis. In fact, he’s on his third breakdown and in denial that this is it - this is the rest of his life.
Hanks with Alexander Black as Clay's chauffeur, Yousef
But it’s the opening shot of Tykwer’s movie that will really grab you. A Hologram for The King explodes into life with a bravado tracking shot of Hanks striding out of his identikit suburban home back in the US as his life implodes around him. He is a man in an awful hurry as giant cartoon dollar coins and notes cascade from the skies and he sings along to the booming soundtrack of Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime, a song that is clearly an inspiration for Tykwer’s adaptation of Dave Eggers’ book.
This is one strange little film. It is many things. A quirky and snarky meditation on how we are all enslaved by money, a black comedy with Kafkaesque undertones, a detached observation on the huge cultural chasm between allies USA and Saudi, a buddy movie, and, eventually, a weird kind of romantic comedy.
Clay arrives in Saudi with a brave face but he is slowly ground down by soul-destroying local bureaucracy. He suffers panic attacks and his inner turmoil soon bubbles to the surface in the form of a horrendous lump which appears on his back overnight.
Hanks with Sarita Choudhury
Is it a metaphor? For course it is but Clay’s new affliction does mean he will cross paths with a divorced and very attractive Muslim doctor (played with great poise by Sarita Choudhury) who has her own societal pressures to deal with. There are laughs along the way. Clay’s frazzled and not entirely reliable chauffeur, Yousef (Alexander Black), is fascinated by American trash culture, and Clay spends several nights partying with decadent Danish ex-pats at their embassy.
It’s all classic Hanks as Everyman stuff but Tykwer brings a clinical and amused German sensibility to proceedings. It doesn’t end with any real resolution and nor does it end entirely happily and for that alone, A Hologram for The King is certainly something different. It seems perfectly happy to exist below the radar.
Alan Corr
