An Hologram for the King
What nice little film, with so many small touches, par for the course with Tom Tykwer. What a scoop it would be to film this in actual Saudi Arabia, I think it’s all CGI and Morocco, Jordan, Egypt. Right?
Tom Hanks plays a broke middle aged salesman who fucked up the Schwinn company by moving production to China, so he needs to work now. He tries to sell some Zoom alternative to the Saudis, for their big NEOM with another name.
This is an absolute fuck up from all possible angles. Nobody tells him anything, he is gaslit by everyone, it’s all a bunch of BS. He then takes some initiative, and leads to nearly fucking a Danish woman in their embassy. He politely declines, but takes her “olive oil” bottle.
In he stupor, he stabs a lump on his back, and has to go to the hospital, where he meets his new flame, a Saudi woman doctor. What are the odds.
This is actually a comedy, with hilarious pratfalls where Tom Hanks demolishes all the chairs he sits in. A touching dramatic comedy, including tragic CIA jokes, smuggling people into Mecca, the whole shebang.
This was explored in much shittier ways with The Company Men. Leave it to the non-Americans to properly analyse them.
I think the woman doctor is supposed to be Saudi, but there is no way in hell they would get an actual Saudi woman to film the beautiful and moving underwater scenes, so an Englishwoman it is, close enough. The Saudi woman that would do it are either dead or dying, since running away with diving instructors is deadly.
The cast us surprisingly eclectic. Tom Skerritt from Alien in a single-day phone rant about de-industrialisation. The Danish woman is from Borgen, and the woman doctor played the main character from Mississippi Massala, how topical.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.