This film is of the sort that is very rare in modern cinema (or the cinema of any period, really): a thoughtful, compelling story for adults in which the life of the protagonist gets better, not worse. A bombastic, jarring, and hilarious opening sequence fills us in on everything that's gone wrong in Alan Clay's (Tom Hanks) life- he's lost his house, his fancy car, his wife, and he's about to go to Saudi Arabia on business. He attributes all of his other problems (lack of energy, poor job performance, sexual impotence) to a benign tumor on his back. He struggles with a lack of Wi-Fi and air conditioning, a business "contact" that always seems to be out of town, indefinite delays, and the innumerable laws and customs of a foreign land. These Kafkaesque elements and director Tom Tykwer's touches of magical realism seem at first to shape A Hologram for the King into a surreal black comedy, the sort of story where the failed businessman is battered down by the inhumanity of capitalism and decides to kill himself rather than face the pathetic reality of his life. But Clay's Middle Eastern odyssey becomes strangely uplifting as he alternately battles and bumbles his way through all his woes. Hologram is never as single-faceted as the moral fable, financial drama, or culture-clash comedy it could have been; instead, it is a subtly heartfelt and frequently hilarious film that shows us that the human experience may not be as hopeless as most other "serious" movies would have you believe.
Review of A Hologram for the King
