By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com
Review: HOLOGRAM FOR A KING
A Hologram for the King is an experimental film, albeit with considerable assets. All the elements one might want are present even if the equation hasn’t properly been worked out.
Its tone swings from sweet to sour with whimsy, dark foreboding, pratfalls and even dashes of surreal. Based upon David Eggers’ book of the same name, the movie confronts a changing worldwith more gusto than clarity, through the eyes of a latterday Willy Loman in a mid-life crisis.
Director-screenwriter Tom Tykwer’s film is ambitious, visually dynamic and has narrative density. What’s daunting is a jaunty giddiness that belies the gravitas not that much below the surface. Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) has been sent to Saudi Arabia by an American tech company to sell its teleconferencing system to the Kingdom. In flashback we learn that he’s divorced, financially strapped and haunted by business decisions made when he was a Schwinn executive. And if that weren’t enough, he also has a cyst on his back that might be malignant. Alan lives a life of quiet desperation that he navigates with an easy smile and an outwardly buoyant personality.
But he’s walked into a society uniquely alien to anything he’s confronted in the past. Cinematographer Frank Griebe (“Run Lola Run,” “Cloud Atlas”) captures vast, arid landscapes in all its natural beauty, juxtaposed with towering modern edifices. The ultra-wealthy and powerful live isolated from a nation in abject poverty and rife with 15th century conditions.
The struggle to acclimate the contemporary with the traditional is the thread that loosely binds A Hologram for the King. Its personification is Yousef (Alexander Black), a savvy driver-for-hire, who spent a year at an American college. He’s smarter than his station but the opportunities to break out of his tribal roots are virtually unthinkable. Still, he’s more forthright and direct than the suspicious and narcissistic officials Alan encounters as he tries to set up a demonstration of his product for the people that matter.
Tykwer, a filmmaker bent on challenging an audience, thwarts expectations with aa circuitous approach to the story. At first, his thefilm unfolds as little more than a first-class travelogue despite the irony that it was actually filmed in Morocco. When the demo of the system finally takes place Tykwer demonstrates his full, flamboyant visual prowess yet it remains an isolated moment. There’s also a late-breaking romance with a local doctor (Sarita Choudhury) that feels contrived. It allows for a clean, optimistic resolution when the appropriate turn would be for a pensive fade-out.
Hanks valiantly attempts to keep all the balls in the air and largely succeeds. He’s evolved into the acting equivalent of Walter Cronkite: the voice you trust. It would have been easy to have Alan Clay wink at the audience but Hanks accepts the character’s ingratiating personality, his crippling blindness and an American go-getter approach that’s decidedly outré and naive.
