EVEN HANKS CAN’T SAVE THIS CHARMLESS FARCE
TOM HANKS doesn’t make many dud choices, but what attracted him to this script, heaven knows.
It is based on a highly regarded 2012 novel by Dave Eggers, so maybe that explains it. But as written and directed by Tom Tykwer it is a distinctly laboured fish-out-ofwater farce — although in this case the fish is not just out of water but stranded in the desert.
Hanks plays Alan Clay, a middlemanager for a U.S. technology company, who is grappling with a mid-life crisis when he is sent to Saudi Arabia to pitch a holographic IT system to the king.
Day after day, Alan waits for the king and his main advisers on the site of the vast desert metropolis they want to build, which is still just rocks and sand.
Unfortunately, they keep failing to show up, leaving Alan increasingly reliant on his driver, a good-natured but accident- prone comedy Arab played by Alexander Black (from California).
To make matters worse, a sinister lump is growing on his back, but at least that facilitates a meeting with a female Saudi doctor (Sarita Choudhury), to whom he takes a fancy.
This shambolic business trip compounds Alan’s existential angst, but not even Hanks at his most affably aw-shucksy is able to imbue the story with charm. It’s just silly, and patronising; not only does he fail to get a response from a taciturn tractor driver to his friendly all-American ‘howdy’, he can’t even get a wifi signal. And the air-conditioning doesn’t work. And the hotel doesn’t have Diet Coke. That’s how primitive they are out there.
If it wasn’t Hanks in the lead role, I might discern a satirical message about naive Western presumptuousness. But he’s clearly meant to draw our empathy, and anyway the film’s not that clever, witness a recurring gag, whereby Alan keeps sitting on collapsing chairs, that frankly would be beneath the Chuckle Brothers.
I haven’t seen the cinema trailers for this film, but my wife tells me they make it look really good. Trust me, it really isn’t.