A Hologram for the King (2016) [R] ***/****

A film review by Ann Hornaday for washingtonpost.com on April 21, 2016.

Tom Hanks plays a globalized version of Willy Loman in A Hologram for the King, Tom Tykwer’s intriguing, if uneven, adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel.

Hanks brings all of his native, optimistic can-do attitude to his character, Alan Clay, an aging corporate executive working for a communications company in Boston. Thanks to a chance encounter years ago with a nephew of the king of Saudi Arabia, Alan’s been tasked with traveling to the kingdom to sell the government some interactive holographic conferencing technology. Jet-lagged, frequently hung over and perpetually out of his depth, Alan is true to his last name: a man in the process of being formed, in this case by a world that’s changing around him with dizzying uncertainty, beauty and speed.

As Alan tries to navigate the opaque inner workings of Saudi politics and culture — the endless waiting for decision-makers who never appear, the polite non-answers to direct questions, the heat and food and confounding cultural contradictions — he’s grappling with an angry ex-wife back in the United States, as well as a mysterious cyst that has appeared in the upper middle of his back. Meanwhile, he keeps missing the shuttle from his hotel to the desolate industrial park where his hologram presentation is supposed to take place any day now, putting him at the mercy of a genial driver named Yousef (Alexander Black), an American-educated bon vivant who reflexively disables his car in order to avoid being bombed by his girlfriend’s suspicious husband.

Alan and Yousef’s friendship accounts for the least-satisfying plot line in A Hologram for the King, which boasts many — most of them clumsily metaphorical. But the viewer comes to see Saudi Arabia through Alan’s eyes: first as an exotic, forbidding geographical and cultural other, eventually as a quasi-familiar embodiment of economic and social realities that are collapsing into each other faster and more dramatically than ever.

These encounters — some might call them collisions — can be violent or delightful, fraught with both danger and romance. Written and directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), A Hologram for the King conveys all of these possibilities with a combination of classical realism and bursts of surrealism. Bringing his all-American persona with him, Hanks makes an appropriate foil for Alan’s own regrets, naiveté and dawning sense of self-discovery, especially when he meets a quietly competent Saudi doctor played by Sarita Choudhury. His is the sentimental education of a new cosmopolitan.

The hero’s journey in A Hologram for the King is mostly interior, and it’s ultimately gratifying. In one brief scene, signs for Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken lie unused, either the portents of Western imperialism or the ruins of its decline. A Hologram for the King leaves viewers with the sense that neither one matters as much as the attempt to adapt and connect. It’s that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead. [Hornaday’s rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 = 62.5%

Blogger’s comment: In 42 years of acting in 93 films Tom Hanks has only made two cross-cultural, romantic dramas. The first one was Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986) an Israeli production set in Jerusalem in 1942 during WWII. In that film he played an American pilot flying for the RAF who falls in love with a Sephardi Jewish girl. In this film he plays an American businessman who falls in love with a Saudi Arabian Muslim physician. So, in the two films he has love affairs with Semitic women living in neighboring countries (Palestine and Saudi Arabia), appears with them in tastefully done love scenes, and makes long-term commitments to both of them. Could it possibly be that he made A Hologram for the King as an homage to Cristina Marsillach, his co-star in Every Time We Say Goodbye?

Labels: comedy, cross-cultural, drama, romance, Tom Hanks
IMDb 61/100
MetaScore (critics=58, viewers=58)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=70)
Blu-ray