I’ve long suspected that the prognosticators tapping A Hologram for the King as a major Oscar contender haven’t read the book on which it’s based. After all, it’s a strange little book, and by Oscar’s standards, pretty uneventful. In my memory, it mostly concerns a middle-aged American man traveling to the Middle East to make a corporate presentation and fiddle with a growth on his back. While Eggers made his name with a maximalist, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek and heart-on-sleeve style, Hologram was stylistically reined in, inflated with allegorical import, and—like its central metaphor—a little bloodless and hollow.
It’s no surprise then that the new trailer for the Hollywood adaptation employs the Talking Heads, some cheesy voice-over narration (“This spring, sometimes you have to change your scenery … to change your life”), and a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-esque mix of animation and live action in order to make things seem a little more lively. (In case you were wondering, no, the novel did not include a scene in which Tom Hanks lip-syncs to “Once in a Lifetime”) Those bells and whistles come courtesy of writer-director Tom Tykwer, who himself can be a master of maximalist style (as in the great and similarly toon-infused Run Lola Run)—which makes him an odd choice to adapt this book.
Still, the best adaptations make you see their source material in new ways, and there are some bright spots here, such as the fact that Tom Hanks gets a love interest who’s at least roughly in the same age bracket (Sarita Choudhury, who, at 49, is still 10 years younger than Hanks). If this one fails, there’s always the other Eggers adaptation coming out in 2016: James Ponsoldt’s adaptation of the Silicon Valley satire The Circle, which also stars (you guessed it) Tom Hanks.
