Hologram for a King (2016)

I am reminded of the Grateful Dead lyric: "sometimes you get shone the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right."
I read this book, and liked it very much, and that is how I feel about the movie as well (kudos to Tom Hanks, who really pulls off the right tone for the lead character, which makes all the difference), and strangely, I think it is better.
Hanks is a kind of Willie Lomanesque character on a last ditch effort to get his career back on track.  He is  trying to sell a hologram contract to the king of Saudi Arabia, who wants to build a city in the middle of the desert that will populate 1.5 million people by 2025. The irony is hard to resist from the beginning—a former failure of empathy, now selling a machine for impersonal business, to an enterprise that may as well be a mirage, for a king who never shows up.  But somewhere along the way, Hanks finds something to love in life after all, and rather than do what most of us would do, he seizes onto it like a life raft and it carries him to the ocean's surface.  Beautifully done.