Modern malaise

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/04/2016 (3497 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One man is named Clay. The other is named Stone.

Both are far from home. Both are once-proud capitalist warriors now disillusioned by the downward spiral of the American dream. Each endures an existential crisis in and outside the generic confines of a hotel suite.

These are the heroes of two different movies opening in Winnipeg theatres this weekend. Even more curious is how very different these movies are.

A Hologram for the King, directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) sees Tom Hanks as a salesman on a do-or-die mission to Saudi Arabia to sell a virtual-reality teleconferencing system to the king. Anomalisa, co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Duke Johnson, utilizes a weirdly sensual stop-motion animation to depict the meltdown of a motivational speaker at a Cincinnati conference, exacerbated by his sudden infatuation with a seemingly unimpressive attendee who quite literally impresses him as a woman like no other.

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Hanks has had lots of experience playing real-life characters in films such as Bridge of Spies, Captain Phillipsand Saving Mr. Banks. The role of salesman Alan Clay in A Hologram for the King feels cut from the same veracity. Clay is a seasoned salesman who has taken his act to Saudi Arabia because the economic bottom has dropped out in his own country.

In fact, the movie comes from a novel by Dave Eggers, adapted by director Tykwer. Eggers’ book takes place mostly in the skull of his hero, so perhaps it’s the novel’s deep background that helped Hanks flesh out the character — a salesman who employs every trick in the book to disarm, engage and makes confederates of everyone he meets… or at least anyone who might do him some good.

In fact, the reason he is on this mission at all has to do with a very tenuous connection to the Saudi royals that Clay has apparently successfully exploited. But upon his arrival in Jeddah, his glad-handing ways invite either suspicion or blank stares. Exacerbating his situation, his American bosses are demanding quick results, but the business culture of the kingdom doesn’t tick to the American clock.

Driven to an under-construction King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade, he finds his support staff exiled outside the main building to a large tent with negligible Wi-Fi/air conditioning. His mustered bluster doesn’t cut any ice when he can’t even get a meeting with his official liaison, let alone learn when the Saudi king will be attending the planned presentation.

Making matters still worse, Clay is getting a growth on his back. It might be a cyst. It might be a manifestation of Clay’s cumulative angst, which also includes his thwarted desire to provide for his daughter’s college education and the legacy of a shameful decision he made years ago involving a venerable American manufacturing company broken apart and shipped to China.

Yet Clay is not alone. He enjoys a flirtation with a Danish payroll contractor (Sidse Babett Knudson) who exposes him to how westerners contend with Arab puritanism at a bacchanal in the Danish embassy. He forms a friendship with his driver, Yousef (Alexander Black), giving him some fatherly advice on how to handle a dangerous love triangle, while absorbing the lay of the Saudi land. And his increasingly dire medical condition necessitates a trip to a female physician, Dr. Zareh Hakem (Sarita Choudhury), who leads him patiently through the minefield of gender politics in the Arab world.

Tykwer’s stylistic flourishes, especially an opening scene that makes Hanks the star of a Talking Heads video, is sometimes at odds with the film’s mission of connecting us to its oft-inscrutable setting. Even so, against a tableau of globalist despair and unease with all things Islamic, through its relatable characters, A Hologram for the King manages the neat trick of being a hopeful and even galvanizing movie about the vexing world in which we live.

Hanks connects by living up to his character’s name. Clay, after all, is not just pervasively available, it is redeemingly malleable to external forces.

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If the mission of A Hologram for the King is to connect us to the unfamiliar, the goal of Anomalisa is to render the familiar in ways that are distressingly unreal.

Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is a motivational expert visiting Cincinnati to be keynote speaker at a customer-service convention. He is a superstar in his field, but in the privacy of his hotel room, he is a pouchy, middle-aged depressive.

Oh, he is also a puppet. In fact, all the characters in the film are puppets shot in stop-motion, a fact that doesn’t diminish their all-too-corporeal appearance onscreen.

It is significant that Stone checks into the Hotel Fregoli. The Fregoli delusion is a psychological malaise whose sufferers believe everyone else in the world is the same person. Indeed, everyone Stone encounters — taxi driver, ex-girlfriend, wife, son, even characters in an old movie — speaks with the same voice (supplied by Tom Noonan) and shares the same face. 

That probably explains why Stone’s heart doesn’t appear to be in it when he looks up an old girlfriend in Cincinnati, but can’t generate enthusiasm for an illicit hook-up. It also explains why Stone is excited to hear a voice he has never heard before coming from the hallway.

A desperate search yields the discovery of Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman who has come to hear Stone speak. She is excited but nonplussed when he lavishes all his attention on her, even to the exclusion of her beautiful BFF (whom Stone, again, sees as just another Noonan). Can this relationship end well? Or will Stone be defeated by a malady that would appear to be a manifestation of his own self-absorption?

Whatever the answer, Anomalisa is hypnotic and gorgeous in its esthetic. This is not the stop-motion of Gumby. The design of the puppets makes human characters look fleshy and vulnerable, especially when they appear nude. (Yes, there is a rather explicit sex scene.) But the puppet medium makes perfect sense, given that most of the characters who appear onscreen have the same face, reflecting the hero’s alienating remove from reality.

Yet the movie does itself alienate. One is reminded that screenwriter Kaufman once wrote himself into the lead role of Adaptation, a project that started life as a film version of the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. 

Anomalisa goes a step further to exhaustively portray the tragedy of a man who can not escape the oppressive confines of his own self-obsession.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT6QJaS2a-U

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing