A Holo­gram for the King

Like Moss­es, Jesus or Matt Damon before him, Tom Han­ks, as the dis­en­chant­ed tech­nol­o­gy sales­man Alan Clay, heads in to the desert in order to bring about a spir­i­tu­al reawak­en­ing. In this adap­ta­tion of the Dave Eggers nov­el of the same name, direc­tor Tom Tyk­w­er, who pre­vi­ous­ly direct­ed Han­ks in the anoth­er lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion, Cloud Atlas, presents Clay as an Odysseus-type fig­ure. He nav­i­gates a sea of exot­ic Mid­dle East­ern cul­ture which dis­tracts him from the job at hand: to present the same tech­nol­o­gy that brought the late Tupac back to the stage to the King of Sau­di Ara­bia. But the King in inevitably delayed. So with the help of local taxi dri­ver Yousef (Alexan­der Black), Clay to is forced to pro­long his stay and pot­ter around this strange land.

Clay is one of Han­ks’ more com­pos­ite char­ac­ters. There is a bit of Joe Fox answer­ing emails, a bit of Chuck Noland tak­ing a knife to his own back and some of Vik­tor Nar­vors­ki, look­ing bewil­dered­ly at a new cul­ture through a win­dow. But the lat­ter per­for­mance thank­ful­ly doesn’t last long, because the wealth of Eng­lish speak­ing, alco­hol drink­ing char­ac­ters he meets in Sau­di Ara­bia makes sure that the most Clay hears of ara­bic and sees of the real Sau­di Ara­bia is exact­ly the amount required to keep diplo­mat­ic rela­tions bub­bling along nicely.

There is only one telling ref­er­ence to the real­i­ty of mod­ern KSA: when shown the square where the pub­lic exe­cu­tions take place Clay exclaims ​“IN PUB­LIC!” As if in Boston they have the good decen­cy to take their exe­cu­tions indoors.

But if you are will­ing to accept this rose-tint­ed ver­sion of Sau­di life, where infrac­tions such as drink­ing alco­hol that would usu­al­ly lead to pub­lic lash­es are instead winked about in a ​‘boys will be boys’ fash­ion, there is adven­ture, humour and pathos to be wit­nessed. The most provoca­tive moments are when Clay looks back with gained hon­esty to his fail­ures to keep his first busi­ness afloat against stiff com­pe­ti­tion from the Chi­nese. There is only a small step need­ed to see this as a film about the prob­lems fac­ing the UK steel industry.

Han­ks ele­gant­ly leads Clay around the dusty hori­zons try­ing to sim­pli­fy the prob­lem of his life through solv­ing prob­lems with his busi­ness. Yet, all he is real­ly look­ing for is com­pan­ion­ship. Which he finds in the form of the beau­ti­ful divorcee, Doc­tor Zahra (Sari­ta Choud­hury). Her brazen atti­tude to life in the KSA cap­ti­vates Clay, as you might expect from a half Eng­lish, half Indi­an actress who played the Queen in Mira Nair’s Kar­ma Sutra: A Tale of Love.

By the end, Clay’s jour­ney to self dis­cov­ery pos­es more ques­tions then the film solves. And thanks to this ambi­gu­i­ty, the film ends up being more a tale of the mod­ern man and not the KSA. A Walden-type para­ble for those men too suc­cess­ful, too respon­si­ble and too sexed-up to take to the woods alone, and have to set­tle for the desert instead.