Tom Hanks is America’s dad. For that reason, there’s something particularly moving about watching Tom Hanks play a sad character, as demonstrated by the utter shambles we were all in by the ending of Captain Phillips. For his next project, Hanks will play one of the most famous American dads, in one of the most moving stories in recent memory.Hanks has joined the cast of Lincoln in the Bardo, the adaptation of the 2017 George Saunders novel by director Duke Johnson. Johnson will combine the approaches of his two previous features, the completely stop-motion Charlie Kaufman collaboration Anomalisa and last year’s live-action mystery film The Actor. Lincoln in the Bardo will be both live action and stop motion, as befitting the surreal story.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Lincoln in the Bardo follows three narrators who spend one evening in the bardo, the space between death and the afterlife. Each of the three narrators has themselves died, and each are at different points of acceptance regarding their fate. The printer Hans Vollmer refuses to believe that he has died, and repeatedly refers to his coffin as a “sick box.” Roger Bevins III died as a closeted gay man and his spirit transforms into a mass of eyes and ears and limbs, seeking all the sensory pleasures denied him in life. Reverend Everly Thomas acknowledges that he has died, but refuses to pass onto the afterlife, fearing that he will not receive the just reward about which he preached.The only thing distracting the trio from their own situations is the young man who has come to join them, the eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln. Willie died of typhoid fever just one year after his father’s inauguration, one of several tragedies marking the legendary American president’s administration.Although Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’s first full-length novel, it contains several hallmarks of the short story writing that have made him one of the best American authors of our time. The liminal state of the characters allows Saunders to indulge his absurdist side, finding both beauty and comedy in the strange situations. And while Saunders invites us to laugh at Vollmer’s stubbornness and to sympathize with Bevins’s loss, the book’s real power comes from its depiction of a father breaking down at his son’s grave.Saunders brings the scene to life by melding prose with newspaper reports, mixing media and literary styles. Duke will do the same by combining stop-motion with live action, using puppets to underscore the uncanny nature of the scene. He’s already demonstrated that he can wring extreme pathos out of puppets in Anomalisa, so there’s little doubt he’ll be able to do it again here.However, Duke’s greatest asset will be Hanks himself. The actor doesn’t resemble traditional images of Lincoln, certainly not as much as Rex Harrison or Daniel Day-Lewis. But Lincoln in the Bardo calls for Honest Abe to be a sad dad, which makes Hanks the best possible choice.Lincoln in the Bardo is now in preproduction.The post Tom Hanks Is About to Play His Most Heartbreaking Role Yet appeared first on Den of Geek.