Review: A Hologram for the King
"How did I get here?" goes one lyric in the Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime," the song played during the dream sequence that kicks off Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King. For businessman Alan Clay (Tom Hanks), en route to Saudi Arabia to pitch his company's holographic teleconferencing system to the country's king, "here" is more than simply finding himself a stranger in a strange land. "Here" is also discovering himself adrift at a time in his life when he should be ever more anchored.
A Hologram for the King is both a character study and a sideways commentary on culture clashes with stripes of Death of a Salesman, Groundhog Day, Eat Pray Love, and the myth of Sisyphus in its narrative DNA. Clay is a salesman, still essentially selling door to door after all these years, and he needs this sale. His boss hectors him about closing the deal. His father (Tom Skerritt), a retired factory worker, carps about jobs being outsourced abroad. His ex-wife harps on him about paying his daughter's college tuition. His daughter (Tracey Fairaway) seems to the only source of kindness and comfort, assuring him that things will work out.
His failures, both past and present, weigh on him, possibly manifesting itself in the cyst that has developed on his back. Failure appears to be on the horizon as well - plagued by jet lag, he constantly misses the shuttle that will take him to the King's Metropolis of Economy and Trade, a fictionalised version of King Abdullah Economic City, and has to rely on the services of a genial driver named Yousef (Alexander Black), who loves American pop music and once studied in Alabama, to chauffeur him to meetings that never happen. Clay's team has been housed in an outdoor tent with no air-conditioning and no Wi-Fi connection. The king is everywhere but where he's supposed to be; none of his aides can provide Clay with concrete answers as to his arrival. One Danish payroll contractor named Hanne (Sidse Babett Knudsen) shares that the ruler hasn't made an appearance in at least 18 months. Day in and day out, it's the same story.
The holding pattern extends to his state of mind. He gently turns down Hanne's sexual overtures, though not the forbidden bottle of alcohol she presents to him as a gift. Meeting with Zahra Hakem (Sarita Choudhury), a Saudi doctor who treats the cyst and a later panic attack, he confides that he feels depleted and directionless. His ensuing romance with Zahra is borne out of a shared loneliness and Hanks and Choudhury let it unfold with a lilting loveliness that mark it as one of the main reasons to see this frequently problematic film. (Their underwater scene recalls Splash, another instance where Hanks' character is saved by a foreigner, albeit a mermaid.)
There have been many films where the wonder is in the wandering, but A Hologram for the King is an especially meandering affair. Tykwer employs his trademark visual inventiveness to stave off viewer disinterest. He and cinematographer Frank Griebe concoct compositions that are crystalline, dreamlike, and frequently comical in their contrasting elements (the city waiting to be built resembling a jigsaw puzzle with a host of missing pieces) further adding to Clay's sense of disorientation and isolation. There are touches of whimsy throughout, which offset the story's more sobersided undertow, but there's no concealing the fact that the beautiful imagery and vignette-like moments never congeal into a whole.
A Hologram for the King
Directed by: Tom Tykwer
Written by: Tom Tykwer; based on the novel by Dave Eggers
Starring: Tom Hanks, Alexander Black, Sarita Choudhury, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Whishaw, Tom Skerritt
