A Hologram for the King (12A)

four stars

Dir: Tom Tykwer

With: Tom Hanks, Alexander Black, Sarita Choudhury

Runtime: 98 minutes

TOM Hanks is often labelled the Everyman of actors, able to portray ordinary mortals with ease. That hardly does credit to the man’s extraordinary abilities. Hanks is arguably the last great movie star, someone who does not simply draw audiences into the cinema on the strength of his name alone, but an actor who can take folk to strange and wonderful places they may not have dreamed of visiting, and leave them glad they came along for the ride.

A Hologram for the King is such an oddball odyssey. Like Cloud Atlas, the other adaptation of a Dave Eggers novel in which Hanks starred, it is one of Hanks’s walks on the wild side. While not as bizarre as Cloud Atlas with its time and space hopping, A Hologram for the King is an unsettling piece, but enjoyably so. This is a film by and for grown ups who know that life does not make much sense at times, and when that happens the only thing to do is hang on and hope that the dust, or in the case of A Hologram for the King, the sand, settles soon.

Hanks plays Alan Clay, to whom we are introduced via a blast of Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads. Once upon a time, Alan had ticked the boxes for a beautiful house, beautiful wife, wonderful daughter, large automobile and all that, but no longer. As a result of divorce such things have gone, and now he is just another late middle-aged, failed executive back on the road and feeling every minute of it in his bones.

Courtesy of a supposed contact he has with a Saudi prince, Alan has been hired to go over to the desert kingdom and pitch the idea of special software that allows business people to “meet” via holograms. No more need for busy bees to go travelling, or indulge in any of that messy person to person stuff; just beam them up, Scotty, and let’s do a deal.

Twyker (who also directed Hanks in Cloud Atlas and whose other pictures include Perfume, Run Lola Run) is on screenplay and directing duties. He and Hanks do a terrific job of hurling Alan into a bewildering world, one that feels immediately alien, and not just because of the jet lag. Saudi Arabia is shown as a place of extremes, where the cutting edge of modernism grates against ancient conventions and the strictest of rules. Alan appears to be in some kind of no man’s land, where nothing makes sense and he, with his American efficiency and hail fellow well met approach, cannot get the most simplest things (arranging a meeting, organising wi-fi) done. Besides the jet lag, he is still fighting his way through the grief of a divorce. He misses his college student daughter. He misses boring old normality.

Fortunately, Alan has a guide by his side in the shape of a taxi driver named Yousef (played by Alexander Black). In western society, Yousef would be called a slacker, a no hoper, yet it is he who helps Alan make sense of often bewildering customs and events. Besides Yousef, Alan meets a local doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury) and a fellow corporate soldier played by Sidse Babett Knudsen of Borgen fame. Will he ever get that promised meeting with the king, or will that turn out, like so many other things, to be a mirage?

A Hologram for the King takes its cue from Alan and Yousef in being funny, wise, and gentle. It bumbles along, not something which will be to everyone’s taste, but for many this will be part of the picture’s charm. Above all there is Hanks. What fascinating choices he is making as his career advances, what chances he is taking with material. The actor who made his name nearly three decades ago playing a kid trapped in an adult body in Big just gets better and better with age