MOVIE REVIEW: A Hologram for the King

One of the reasons people make movies is so that other people will not be required to read books. Students have long perceived this utility, reasoning that a couple of hours spent with a DVD of All Quiet on the Western Front might give them a bluffer's chance of knowing something about Erich Maria Remarque's Paul Baumer. (Hopefully they go for the Lewis Milestone Oscar-winning version from 1930 rather than the 1979 TV movie.)

But we sophisticated moviegoers understand books don't always replicate the tone -- much less the plot specifics -- of their source material. Great films may be made from lousy books, and vice versa. Demi Moore might make The Scarlet Letter into a bodice ripper.

So it's interesting how Tom Tykwer, in his film adaptation of Dave Eggers' fine novel A Hologram for the King, compacts and embeds the themes of economic desperation and displacement the writer wove into his parable of globalization into a bravado opening sequence in which a business-suited executive (Tom Hanks) strolls a suburban street speak-singing a customized version of the Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime."

"You may find yourself," he talk-sings, "without a beautiful house, without a beautiful wife" as the accoutrements of American upper middle class success -- the house, the car, the wife -- vanish into purple smoke behind him.

It's an astonishing sequence, evoking in a playful yet deeply affecting way both a Willy Loman-esque disillusion of the squared-away rule follower and the slipping away of American economic primacy in a global economy as it reverses the polarity of the David Byrne original (which suggested that someday punk rockers would wake up surrounded by the same material signifiers as their parents).

What Eggers took chapters to establish, Tykwer manages to subliminally install. So when the businessman, whom we will soon learn is named Alan Clay (a malleable sort), wakes up on a plane amid rows of white burnoosed pilgrims heading for Saudi Arabia, we instantly understand his flop sweat. He never signed up for this.

The film calms down at this point as we are dropped into a fish-out-of-water comedy about an old-school American salesman having to negotiate 21st-century realities. Alan is in Saudi hoping to redeem himself and his fortunes, which have lately slipped. Once he was the driving force behind the dubious plan to outsource the production of Schwinn bicycles to China; now he finds himself jet-lagged in a Hilton in Jeddah, being driven each day -- invariably late -- to a big white tent in the desert on the site of the under-construction King's Metropolis of Economy and Trade. (The city actually exists, and in the novel it's called by its real name, the King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC. Why it was changed for the movie is anyone's guess; maybe the filmmakers thought American audiences might be confused since King Abdullah died in 2015.)

Alan's job is to facilitate the meeting with the king and sell him a holographic communications system, which is extremely important to the Boston-based home office and, we learn, to the salesman. (Divorced, he's struggling to keep his daughter enrolled in an Ivy League school.) But he finds his Glengarry Glen Ross-style skill set ill-suited for dealing with the complacent indifference of the Saudi bureaucracy.

Hanks is terrific as anachronistic Alan, a glad-handing hustler who's always armed with an icebreaking joke. But for all the character's glibness, he's not a shallow man -- he understands he only got the gig because of an obscure connection to one of the king's relatives. A know-nothing in the information society, he's in far over his head. What's worse is that he has the grace to know it.

The film unspools in episodic fashion, hewing fairly closely to Eggers' story. Alan divides his time between Jeddah and the desert and forms a credible bond with a socially awkward young Saudi driver (played with subtlety by newcomer Alexander Black, a New Yorker who probably will become the center of a whitewashing controversy), and befriends first a Danish consultant named Hanne (Sidse Babett Knudsen), and a Saudi doctor named Dr. Zahra Hakim (Sarita Choudhury).

It is through these relationships -- as well as a trip to a barely occupied high-rise in the under-construction city -- that Eggers, via Tykwer, critiques the puritan hypocrisy and sharply drawn divisions inherent in Saudi society. For the cosmopolitan overclass -- which includes foreign diplomats and high-paid professionals -- the country is a covert playground where great wealth and hedonism meet in fabulous subterranean spaces. Meanwhile squatters subsist in unfinished apartments, a fundamentalist theocracy enforces draconian rules, and adults smuggle whiskey in olive oil bottles. Only burqa-wearing women can sell lingerie in Saudi Arabia because the king decrees it. Tykwer underlines this with a shot of models with their faces airbrushed away -- a horrifying moment of commodification.

It's difficult to say why A Hologram for the King isn't more satisfying; Hanks does very good work eliciting empathy for a terrified character who probably ought to be viewed as a minor villain. And Choudhury is the best part of the film's third act, delivering a needed dose of redemptive tenderness.

Probably it's just the downbeat context of the film -- Alan's a lost man without serious prospects but with decades of life stretching out ahead of him. His world has ended, his dreams evaporated in purple smoke. He keeps telling jokes that nobody gets. Something is happening, he doesn't know what it is -- and so he stays affable. Defeated, but affable.

MovieStyle on 05/13/2016