Aubrey MaloneA Hologram for the King (15A)
I used to think Jack Lemmon was the natural heir to James Stewart’s status as Hollywood’s Mr Ordinary, but in latter years it’s Tom Hanks who seems to have assumed that mantle. Here he’s Alan Clay, a fish out of technological water as he attempts to sell IT to an Arabian king who continually eludes him.
As the film begins he feels the deal is already in trouble. Nobody in Saudi Arabia seems to evince the least bit of interest in himself or his colleagues, who malinger in a huge tent that (horror of horrors) doesn’t even have wi-fi.
For the next 90 minutes, Clay gets ferried around Saudi by an excessively garrulous taxi driver called Yousef (Alexander Black) as he tries to cope with executive stress and a mysterious lump in his back which he lances one night after imbibing too much liquor.
Is it benign? The answer to that question lies with Zahra (Sarita Choudhury), the pretty doctor he attends to have it diagnosed. The relationship between them becomes more than professional as the film goes on.
Clay also has a brief fling with a Danish consultant and is mistaken for a CIA man by one of Yousef’s friends who’s sorely lacking in humour.
If this patchy resumé makes the film sound like there are too many ingredients in the plot – there are. It’s a pleasantly picaresque treatment of culture clashes but it veers off in more directions than is good for it. We get back onto some kind of narrative unity towards the end, the episodic strands cohering into, of all things, a love story, but by then our attentions have been too diversified too often.
Good ***
There’s a subtle racism underlying many of the scenes. This seems to suggest that western culture with its beer and Coca-Cola and loose living is infinitely superior to a world of severity, burkhas and, yes, people who don’t have a sense of humour. (Zahra is able to joke about booze – and even Clay’s operation – which makes her somehow “good enough” to be his girlfriend.)
Excellent
Hanks is excellent as the wide-eyed businessman intent on bringing the holy grail of American expansiveness to the Middle East only to have his pocket picked at the eleventh hour. He manages to be hangdog and intense in equal measure as he tries to juggle the demands of a dead marriage and a college-hungry daughter whom he Skypes in his hotel room after yet another meeting with the eponymous king comes to nought.
The direction is whimsical but, again, touches on too many issues – like the religious differences between east and west – without exploring any of them in detail.
The result is a mixed grill that winds to a conclusion reminiscent of the William Holden film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing after whetting our appetite for something quite different. I left the cinema only partially satisfied.