Tom Hanks and director Tom Tykwer are teaming up again, this time to direct the Dave Eggers novel A Hologram for the King.
According to Variety, Tom Hanks and Tom Twyker are teaming up for another literary adaptation. Last year, they adapted the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas. They must have enjoyed the process for they are adapting another novel – Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks will star as well as produce with his production company Playtone. Twyker will direct and produce.
The A Hologram for the King novel was published in July 2012. It was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. Here’s the description of the novel on Amazon:
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together.
The Philadelphia Inquirer review helps show more of what the novel actually is (via SlashFilm):
The book is emblematic of what Eggers sees as wrong in America today: the collapse of homegrown industry, the outsourcing of labor, a loss of confidence, soured ideals. . . . But [it] isn’t a bummer—or if it is, it’s a bummer beautifully enlivened by oddball encounters and oddball characters, by stranger-in-a-strange-land episodes.
Tom Hanks is no stranger to the “oddball encounters and oddball characters, by [a] stranger-in-a-strange-land” role, and it’ll be great to see him play it again. Though the two movies will assumedly be very different from each other, that sentence can’t help but make us think of Forrest Gump. If Hanks can deliver a similar performance (spoiler alert: he can), this will certainly be a film to look forward to.
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