A Hologram To The King (12A)

WE'RE used to seeing Tom Hanks play American heroes, whether real-life astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 or the fictional war hero Forrest Gump. So there’s a particular pathos when this most likeable of actors represents America on the skids.

Published in 2012, Dave Eggers’s acclaimed novel reflects a post-recession America that no longer commands the respect to which it’s accustomed. And the salesman Alan Clay – newly divorced, broke, struggling to pay for his daughter’s education and with his career on the ropes – is an embodiment of that national malaise.

Yet there’s humour too, as Alan waits for days and weeks in a tent in the Saudi Arabian desert, for a make-or-break sales pitch to the king, who never shows up. This is much more akin to Waiting For Godot than Death Of A Salesman.

Director Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas) is a great visual director, and he launches into his story with a typical bang as Hanks’s Alan appears in a pop video riff on Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime, the lyrics cleverly tweaked so that he’s now lost the "beautiful wife" and "large automobile", everything in his ordered life going up in a puff of purple smoke.

This isn’t a perverted advertisement, but a dream, from which Alan awakes, very amusingly, on the plane to Saudi. His mission in the Middle East: to pitch his company’s high-tech, holographic teleconferencing system to the king, in the hope of winning the IT contract for a new city, the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade, which is very slowly being built in the desert.

They’ve only been invited to bid because Alan knows the king’s nephew – though, like so much in the film, that relationship is a comical mirage. And when he arrives, the welcome could not be more underwhelming: his young IT team set up in a tent, with no food, no wi-fi, no-one paying a blind bit of notice. The king hasn’t been on site for months. And so, with no resources and no love, they wait.

Suffering from culture shock, anxiety and increasing inebriation (despite the fact that alcohol is forbidden in the country), Alan’s nose-diving state of mind and body culminates in a large and irksome boil on his back. He’s first offered succour by his local driver, Yousef, an amiable eccentric who helps Alan acclimatise to the country, and a friendly if overly flirtatious Danish consultant. Then, when Saudi doctor Zahra (Sarita Choudhury) attends to his boil, there comes a glimmer of romance and a renewed sense of hope.

Tykwer, who has also written the adaptation, captures the smarts of the book, its strangeness, bitter-sweet wit and melancholy. And his adept use of flashbacks works in tandem with the obvious visual metaphors – the boil manifesting Alan’s personal travails, the hologram the dissipation of America’s status in the world. So we come to understand that just as Alan’s outsourcing of jobs to China presaged the demise of his previous company, so his present one can’t stand up to the same, cut-price competition.

But Tykwer also seems to suffer from the enervation that threatens to overcome the salesman. Interesting characters fade away, thematic elements are under-developed, the finished film feels truncated, as though some of its reels had been left in the desert.

What makes it worthwhile, finally, is another of Tom Hanks’s skilfully portrayed and beautifully relatable good guys. As Alan first approaches his IT team, his face struggling to transform from grimace of despair to smiling, dependable enthusiasm, Hanks captures the tragic show of so many struggling in the day-to-day.

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