A Hologram for the King (2016)

A Hologram for the King arrives as a 2016 international co-production in which Tom Hanks, playing a washed-up salesman named Alan Clay, travels to a planned city in the Saudi desert to sell a holographic teleconferencing system to a monarch who never appears. The film is adapted from a Dave Eggers novel, which is to say it carries the faint whiff of literary seriousness without ever committing to an argument. Tom Tykwer directs with the patience of a man watching sand settle. The result is a mild, sunstruck comedy of frustration, and our classification duties here are correspondingly mild.

Where the film registers on the cultural instruments, it does so softly. The Saudi setting is populated with Middle Eastern actors and a non-white female lead, cast as a matter of narrative convenience instead of representational declaration. Zahra, the doctor who treats the protagonist's back lump, is granted a career, children, and a divorce in progress, which is more agency than the genre typically extends. She is also, in the end, the romantic reward for a man who has accomplished nothing, a tension the film does not notice. The racial friction between American salesman and Saudi bureaucracy is played for comic bewilderment, a shrug instead of an examination. The sharpest edge belongs to the corporate critique: Clay is haunted by outsourcing Schwinn's manufacturing to China, and the deal collapses to a cheaper Chinese competitor, a tidy indictment of global capital and the empty condominiums it erects.

The remaining instruments read flat. No environmental argument attaches to the desert, which is backdrop and not thesis. The lump is medical anxiety, not a statement about bodies. No LGBTQ characters appear, no neurodivergent ones either, and the film revises no history because it invents its own. The critique of outsourcing arrives through melancholy glances, not sermons. The tally, then, is a pleasant film about a man failing upward in a country the screenplay never quite understands, asking nothing of us beyond endurance of its amiable drift.