When you're 50, and you're at a crossroads again
Alan Clay (Tom Hanks), an average American, does not go very well: the wife-brawler makes money demands, the middle-aged, but still a loving daughter works as a waitress to pay for college, although Alan assures her for the tenth time that all the financial delays - it's not for long. At work, too, not very much arguing, so when fate brings Mr. Clay by a dubious business trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he clings to a straw. Alan brings the presentation of the IT project to the country of oil and strict morals, if everything goes well, everything should be exactly right - and this is very important when you are 50, and you are again at a crossroads.
A productive chief, with a flick of his fingers solving all the problems - from the choking and starving office workers who suddenly found themselves in a tent in the middle of the desert, until the very decisive presentation without any hints of a Wi-Fi signal - of course, Hanks' character does not work. In addition, the very king still needs to find out and make him come to Saudi Arabia at the same time with you, that in fact, too, the task is not easy. However, the question is not even this, but how to turn all the disasters that have migrated with the hero to the Arabian desert, into a revelation from above.
Directed by Tom Tykwer, who once showed the world the adaptation of the Sukkund's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, moving in pursuit of the meaning of the iconic red-haired young woman in Lola rennt and the fantastic Cloud Atlas, filmed with the Wachowski sisters, this time takes over the novel winner Pulitzer Prize Dave Eggers. After him, Tykwer tells the story of Alan's lousy loser, choosing for the narrative either a form of drama with an existential touch, or a comedy, only a rather sad sort, or a tragicomedy with a completely tragic ending. With the naked eye you can see that all this Saudi exotic Tykwer really likes, but there is only the feeling that he studied it frankly so-so, on top: smoothly rustling deserts, discrimination of the female population down to noble professions (in spite of the fact that Clay is lucky in every way life reduces him to a fine doctor in hijab), grandiose plans to build a city of dreams in the middle of the desert. In addition to all, of course, the fear of being blown up at every turn - all this has already been heard, we know: Tykwer does not undertake to rethink the unconscious ideas of a distant country.
He does not seem to even think of this: after all, Clay mentally and physically healed enjoys the company of his beautiful savior on the Red Sea, and obviously, there are no barriers to the union of such different mentalities. Tykwer does not see it. "In fact, we are very similar to you," says Dr. Alan, and later his lover Sarah Choudhury. Not only Alan and Zahra are alike, but Alan and Yusif are a faithful hero-driver who has repeatedly helped an unlucky American out of the misfortunes that lie on his head for sand in the desert. Yusif loves Elvis Presley and the group "Chicago", and after a while Alan also likes the Arabic melodies with which Yusif fills the space around him in the intervals from thinking about the fate of the Arab people and the possibility of a democratic revolution.
The directing metaphor is simple: spiritual liberation follows the liberation of the physical, when the usual view of life returns to Alan after the operation. Sometimes unsweetened, unpredictable and presenting at a time when (and where) least of all you are waiting for: this is the law of the genre, which cannot be affected by arbitrarily strict morals.