Measuring Love and Anger

Tom Hanks beats President Obama to Saudi Arabia in A Hologram for the King, in which an American business deal turns into a personal sanity-keeping mission. As information-technology salesman Alan Clay, who is assigned to pitch an IT system to a Saudi royal, Hanks varies his role in Bridge of Spies. Unlike Spielberg’s specious allegory condemning U.S. Cold War subterfuge, A Hologram for the King assuages American guilt even while admitting U.S. complicity in international corporate alliances that are questionable.

Clay’s feeling of culpability applies to his personal life as well as his profession. Formerly an exec who facilitated China’s takeover of the Schwinn bicycle company (a touch that implicitly works as a Spielberg corrective), Clay suffers remorse brought on by his father’s scorn for “hollowing out [our] economy” and by the distance his divorce creates from his college-age daughter — all manifested in fatigue and physical ailments. This disorientation is presented comically (as based on the novel by satirist Dave Eggers), and director Tom Tykwer makes good use of the story’s culture-clash premise.

Tykwer, who directed the gimmicky chase film Run, Lola, Run, depicts the irony of an American in the Middle East and the vast Saudi setting to an unusual effect: Clay’s dilemma occurs in a new frontier heightened by a possibility for renewal and education. This bests such post–9/11 comedies as Bill Murray’s Rock the Kasbah, Albert Brooks’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, and Mike Nichols’s Charlie Wilson’s War, which was the sarcastic low point of Hanks’s political filmmaking.

Hanks has moved forward — as an artist must, and as American foreign policy should have — toward reconciliation. A Hologram for the King lets modern technological commitment (the world’s new secular faith in industry) lead toward Clay’s rediscovery of his humanity. The film’s title is a metaphor for virtual presence — political occupation supplied without emotional guarantee — but that changes when Clay meets a female Saudi doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudury). Their rapport makes a humanist message that surpasses the sexless, passionless sentimentality in Bridge of Spies. Clay laments, “I’ve lost direction, strength, certain abilities.” Hanks embodies that weakening humorously and is believably less gung-ho than in Bridge of Spies. His needful contrast to the calm, dark-skinned Choudury avoids the conventional Western lapse into exoticism because Choudury evokes Ava Gardner, a reminder of human connection. (“We are separated by the thinnest filament,” Zahra tells Clay.) Her still-waters beauty is an oasis in the moral desert of a constantly alienating world.

Tykwer doesn’t overplay the obvious scenes of Clay’s détente with his Saudi driver, Yousef (Alexander Black), but even the image of Yousef’s family praying while Clay handles the family’s stock of rifles (evoking his own Texas boyhood memories) is, ideologically, just “universal” enough (and another Spielberg corrective). Clay and Zahra’s mutual seduction is the film’s high point. It turns political and cultural détente into an adult, erotic ideal, something better than a bridge.

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Thierry Taugourdeau, the 51-year-old out-of-work Frenchman played by Vincent Lindon in The Measure of a Man, is not angry. But his frustration, as detailed in Stéphane Brizé’s film, is what media pundits like to label as “anger.” That term, frequently used during the current presidential primary campaigns to describe populist movements, sexes up a disenchantment, a sense of defeat, and an irritation that can be manipulated by politicians and categorized by journalists who seek an easy diagnosis and explanation for a complicated social and spiritual illness. The Measure of a Man coincidentally corrects this development. It charts a global unease in the case of a working-class white male trying to stay afloat in Europe’s unsteady economy.

After 20 months of unemployment, Thierry is desperate for work; his background as a machinist is his only experience. Brizé shows Thierry’s struggles to keep his wife (Karine de Mirbeck) and his autistic son (Mattthieu Schaller) in their mortgaged home. Brizé’s unplotted, naturalistic style highlights a common man’s series of on-going indignities. Thierry’s desperate straits are similar to those of the other working-class folk he encounters (men, women, whites, blacks, Muslims), all wrestling with daily needs, measured through the Euro.

Brizé’s position on this is obvious from the film’s original French title, La Loi du marché which translates as “The Law of the Market.” Thierry is viewed as a capitalist commodity. He’s the only character with a full name — an alliteration that’s practically a bureaucratic designation. Brizé tries to extract Thierry’s humanity from the dehumanizing circumstances of the labor market. Various sequences depict Thierry in immobile situations or forced to follow regimented movements.

European filmmakers are the first — and best — to imagine this dilemma. It’s been the constant subject of Belgium’s Dardennes brothers — often to a point of exasperation — most recently in Two Days, One Night with Marion Cotillard, cinema’s reigning sad-sack actress, whom the Dardennes dragged through the proletarian stations of the cross. She played Sandra, a stressed-out worker begging for her downsized job, too demoralized and depressed to feel anger. Instead, her conniptions and crying jags were the disguise of the desperately alienated.

#related#Watching Thierry’s and Sandra’s travails brought back a pop-culture memory about “anger,” when Elvis Costello’s debut album, My Aim is True (1977), caused him to be mistakenly categorized with the political faction of Britain’s punk movement. One of Costello’s most impassioned, politically shaded songs was “I’m Not Angry.” I first misheard its cryptic opening lyrics as “Europe’s in a boardroom while I feel futile listening,” as if it were related to the Sex Pistols’ anarchic wanting to “go over the Berlin Wall.” But, in fact, Costello was singing his refusal to admit anger or confess class and bedroom defeat.

What sounded to me like seething, barely suppressed anger was, actually, freshly articulated dissatisfaction and disgust. That’s also what Thierry comes to feel when forced to play big brother as a store security guard, spying on customers and fellow employees. “Anger is an energy,” John Lydon sang, but it’s not always politicized, as Thierry importantly demonstrates. In a moral sense he’s been taxed enough already, and instead of shouting in anger, he walks away and drives off, seeking an economic and moral alternative. Pundits can learn a lot about what “anger” really means from The Measure of a Man.