A Hologram For the King (2016)

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tom Tykwer
    Tom Hanks, Sarita Choudhury, Alexander Black,
    Sidse Babett Knudsen, Tom Skerritt, Ben Whishaw,
    Tracey Fairaway, Jane Perry, David Menkin
Jack Lemmon's not around anymore, so it appears to be up to Tom Hanks to play the kinds of roles Lemmon used to specialize in: the middle-aged, middle-class Middle American, the guy who puts on a suit to go to work every day, a beleaguered everyman still chasing some ever-more-elusive remnant of the American Dream. Hanks is good at this, a forced, can-do grin doing nothing to mask the anxiety and encroaching sense of failure in his heart. In this movie, he plays a businessman named Alan, really a high-end sales rep, who jets off to Saudi Arabia to pitch his company's hot new IT system to the king. Once there, he's put on hold, and waits, and waits, and waits. While he's waiting, he strikes up a friendship with a driver (Alexander Black), and something more than a friendship with a female doctor (Sarita Choudhury), and what starts out as a fish-out-of-water comedy evolves into an unlikely but nicely played mid-life romance. Whether a Saudi woman could get away with something like this in her own country, I'm not sure, but you can always hope. Which is what our heroic sales guy finally finds there: a shot at redemption and a measure of self-respect that Willy Loman wouldn't dare to imagine. Hanks even gets to do a little David Byrne riff to start off the movie. Jack Lemmon never had it so good.