Despite the popularity of novelist Dave Eggers, there haven’t been any major film adaptations of his work, probably because his knowingly scattershot style isn’t exactly friendly to the conventions of screenwriting. His prose is filled with digressions and zigzagging asides, passages that jump around in space and time and swirl around a central idea without ever fully landing. This approach reached something of a zenith in his novel A Hologram for the King, a Waiting for Godot-esque reverie about a disillusioned American businessman and his dealings in Saudi Arabia. Like most of Eggers’ novels, the book resists traditional narrative by dealing in anti-climax and rambling interiority, and it seems a difficult if not odd choice for a movie. Appropriately enough, this filmed version of A Hologram for the King does a lot of rambling, but it’s done entirely in service of a meandering story about what it means to meander.
To some degree, the film is another in a painfully long line of cinematic and novelistic stories about wayward Westerners and their search for catharsis in foreign lands. The plot follows Alan Clay (Tom Hanks), a failed and disillusioned businessman who arrives in Saudi Arabia for one last attempt at saving his career. He sets up shop in the city of Jeddah, near the King Abdullah Economic City, a budding mega-metropolis and major civic undertaking in the early stages of development, where he’s to pitch the king on a highly technological holographic teleconference system. But the king is always off in another country doing something else, leaving Alan plenty of time to wile the days and consider the major events in his life, including his divorce, his deteriorating relationship with his college-aged daughter, his failed career and a strange, hump-like growth protruding from the base of his neck.
Tom Tykwer, the ambitious if nutty director of Run Lola Run and Cloud Atlas, is the man behind the camera, and he’s as good a choice as any to bring this book to life. Like Eggers, Tykwer has never met metaphor he didn’t like, and he’s similarly drawn to aestheticizing every little theme and idea he can muster. The film abruptly begins with an awkward dream sequence, in which Alan reveals his diminishing fortunes in a weird parody of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” complete with reshaped lyrics about his beautiful wife and his beautiful house and a shot that shows him sitting on a moving roller coaster with a detached, bored look on his face. The sequence, like the others that pop up throughout the film, telegraphs its intentions so clearly and with such overtness that it sort of renders the idea of it all being a metaphor moot. (Eggers fans should feel right at home.)
But then the story itself is also completely moot, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately, the mechanisms of the plot—the pitch, the divorce, the failed career, even the weird bump—are superfluous and, not unlike the holographic technology at the center of it all, something of an illusion. The film’s best moments arrive when Tykwer manages to convey what it’s like to live inside that illusion. Hoping to bring commercial investors to the KAEC, real estate advisors advertise the impending arrival of major fast food chains in the lobbies of partially built skyscrapers, though one of them admits to Alan that it’s all a ruse. Elsewhere in the buildings, laborers fistfight in makeshift boxing rings set up among the half-completed architecture as their coworkers gawk and take bets, all while the suits reside up top in clean, completely finished condos. The rest of the KAEC, a hulking metaphor for global economics and the almost delirious implications of late capitalism, is in the early stages of construction, but it also looks like it could be at the tail end of destruction; the lack of completion and widespread detritus make it impossible to tell without knowing. Such is the illusion of progress, and such is the space where A Hologram for the King makes its most insightful observations on the sublime nature of arrested development.
As Alan spins his wheels in the desert, palling around with his wisecracking Saudi driver (Alexander Black) and flirting with a lusty Danish dignitary (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the film eases into a number of scenarios without committing to a single one, giving Tykwer space to toy with various metaphors and fantasy scenarios. (There’s even an animated sequence, for whatever reason.) It’s a conceited but not completely unenjoyable ride, up until the film settles on a routine romance between Alan and a divorced local doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury), which centers the story but also brings it to a halt. Their courtship provides Tykwer with another opportunity to reference illusions—Alan and Zahra take a dip in the Red Sea, but she has to swim topless so her ultraconservative neighbors will assume it’s two men swimming rather than her with a strange man—but it also gives him an easy way out. The film ends with the obvious notion that Alan has finally figured things out, despite spending the bulk of its time making a convincing and somewhat moving argument that one can reach a point in life where there’s nothing left to learn.