Jump cuts. Voice overs. Visual story telling.
This film follows every rule from my screenwriting class. Whether it was the cuts during traveling scenes or when Tom Hanks’ character Alan remembers the past, the cuts specifically made the film entertaining. It was riveting to see something in the most mundane and rather depressing story– a la Death of a Salesman– made so aesthetically pleasing. With visuals that compare to Life of Pi, Tom Tykwer’s (Cloud Atlas) direction of Bob Eggers’ book of the same name most definitely is reason enough to see the film.
Also starring Sarita Choudary as Zahra, a Saudi Arabian female doctor, and Alexander Black as Yousef, a joke-cracking cab driver, the film moves through Alan’s work trip in trying to meet the King of Saudi Arabia to sell him hologram technology. His job on the line, his marriage on the rocks, his daughter’s college tuition soaring; Alan is in his own Lost in Translation depressive state. He’s at his wit’s end, essentially as depressed as ever, just surviving from day to day.
The story isn’t new, of course; we’ve seen the depressed man experience some sort of awakening in countless other films like American Beauty or Her. And we’ve seen the “American travels to new country” film hundreds of other times as well.
But there’s something different about this film that keeps you watching. Visuals aside, the film draws you in with a very subtle symbol of a growing cyst on Alan’s back. Try as he might, the cyst remains, a plot point in moving Alan’s meeting of Zahra. While that symbolism alone could drown the audience, Tykwer’s movement between frames and scenes creates a whole new story in itself: what we see on screen as a man trying to sell this pretty useless piece of technology to a man who will never present himself, the subtext is far greater: he’s battling with depression, he has far too many responsibilities or else he would just end it there.
Again, so stunning is the visual representation of Alan’s feelings that we are immersed in his situation. One of Alan’s turning points calls for his character having a panic attack, disguised by signs of a stroke. Alarmed, the audience is on the edge of their seats, but the camera work truly draws the viewer in, with a shaking and blurred effect transforming the viewer into Alan. This is Hardcore Henry done right: if Tom Hanks weren’t so good looking or such a big star, this may have very well been filmed in a POV aspect, and nothing would have changed.
We screened the film at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
