The bleaker Clay’s predicament, the lighter and more facetious the storytelling becomes. It seems crazy, though, for Tykwer to treat such downbeat material as the stuff of screwball comedy. His cheerfulness becomes harder and harder to maintain. Bonhomie, optimism and wisecracking can only get Clay so far. It is one of his richest recent performances. Here, he shows a darker, more anxious side to that character. Hanks is often cast as the dependable American everyman type. German writer-director Tom Tykwer is very good at capturing the sense of ennui and pointlessness that his protagonist feels as he wrestles with the metaphysical meaninglessness of existence. This is a very strange film, perched between whimsy and despair. A last chance to save his career comes in the form of a trip to Saudi Arabia, where he is to pitch a potentially lucrative IT project involving holograms to the king. There’s a lump on his back that may be cancerous. He can no longer afford to pay his daughter’s college fees. “Do you ever feel you might have done it differently?” is the question that Tom Hanks’ character asks himself again and again in A Hologram For The King (adapted from Dave Eggers’ bestselling novel.) Alan Clay is a middle-aged, middle-class American businessman whose life is dribbling away from him.
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