A Hologram for the King: Hollywood imagines the great American novel

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The modern American novelist has never really been expected to create individual characters. Instead, critics require him to pronounce on his society, to take the temperature of the American family, for example, or better yet, report on the condition of the American male. The protagonists of his books summarize the plight of entire categories of people: the grasping rich, disappointed middle class or disaffected youth. Over in Hollywood, meanwhile, the agreed-upon role of the writer and director is very different if perhaps no less difficult: They are simply required to produce something that makes money.

How else to explain the odd gap that arises between the bestselling 2012 novel by Dave Eggers entitled A Hologram for the King and its movie adaptation starring Tom Hanks as a struggling IT salesman trapped in a tent in the Arabian desert?

Eggers's novel is a richly conceived satire of American economic decline in which the divorced and indebted Alan Clay, an offshore outsourcing expert who has inadvertently felled the companies that once employed him, travels to Saudi Arabia to try to sell a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah. It is a book about the kind of guy who might have good reason to support Donald Trump, were he not blessed with the acute self-awareness of all protagonists in fiction.

The novel did well with critics, who noted Clay's important similarity to that previous barometer of middle-class angst, Willy Loman in Death of A Salesman. Many readers also embraced the book, although some have taken to review sites to vow that they will kill themselves before they read yet another lament for the privileged white male.

And then there is A Hologram for the King, a film that reunites Hanks with writer and director Tom Tykwer after their less-than-successful outing in another literary adaptation, Cloud Atlas. This time, Tykwer somehow manages to turn Eggers's attempt at an era-defining story into a weird little cross-cultural comedy with romantic overtones while remaining largely faithful to the original plot and dialogue. Here, globalization's economic devastation is just a nice backdrop for some amusing – and, thankfully, inoffensive – observation of one American abroad.

Tykwer begins by ticking off the back story of Clay's divorce and near-bankruptcy with a clever opening sequence riffing off the Talking Heads song Once in A Lifetime as a beautiful house and beautiful (or this case nagging) wife explode in puffs of purple smoke. It's very cute, but it packages up Clay's underlying desperation and puts it to one side so the film can concentrate on his quietly funny encounters in King Abdullah Economic City, the mega project in the desert that might just need the Americans to wire it.

In this half-built wasteland with one office building and one condo tower, Clay's IT team is banished to a large tent with no food and unreliable WiFi while waiting weeks for a meeting with a king who never materializes. As his business contacts delay and defeat him at every turn, Clay's guide in this infuriating place is his driver Yousef (Alexander Black), an American-educated layabout who is worried that the husband of the woman with whom he is sexting will blow up his car. The other sympathetic Saudi is a female doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury), whom Clay consults about an alarming growth on his back.

As the film chases after an improbable romance with Zahra, you have to wonder what vision Tykwer is pursuing. It isn't really Eggers's. In two key instances, one on a hunting trip with Yousef where Clay considers whether he will shoot a marauding wolf, and the other in the romance with Zahra, the film departs in small but significant ways from the book, opting for a lighter and less bleak interpretation of Clay's lack of agency and his future.

Hanks, ever the nice guy, can furrow his brow in friendly befuddlement at foreign ways like no one else in Hollywood. He did that exceedingly well in Bridge of Spies last year as a right-minded New York attorney facing unbending Communists and he does it now as Alan dealing with inscrutable Saudis. He is hugely likeable and strongly supported by Black and Choudhury: the film is told from an exclusively American viewpoint but it handles the cross-cultural encounter with intelligence and tact.

And yet, if Clay is really going to represent middle America defeated by globalization, Hanks is miscast in the role because his own celebrity symbolizes so strongly the triumph of American decency. You have to wonder what this film would feel like if a darker figure, a Robert Downey Jr. or Edward Norton, for example, had been cast in the lead role.

Tykwer's startling achievement here is to turn a book about a society or class into a film about one individual – and an individual who, because the director has changed the ending, is eventually redeemed. It doesn't make a particularly convincing story, but it's an intriguing process to watch: apparently the movie business knows no antihero who cannot be repurposed as a hero. Hollywood is one American industry that seems to be doing just fine.