Beatriz at Dinner

Beatriz made everyone at dinner so uncomfortable and squirmy, and they deserved every second of it.

People who take from and abuse the world being called on it is one of my favorite movie genres. Making the excuse that we're all here for a short time, so why not just enjoy ourselves is the most selfish thing ever said. People with the resources should be helping others in some way, not just helping themselves.

Salma is fantastic as Beatriz. Lithgow is too, as the smarmy billionaire. This movie will give you a lot to think about. It may not be for everyone, and the outcome is not completely satisfying. I thought I was getting a comedy, seeing as it was written by Mike White, who gave us School of Rock.

Beatriz at Dinner sells itself as the "first important film of the Trump Era," a galvanizing must-see sparring between two embodiment's of the modern American political landscape. In the blue corner the genteel, multi-cultural, bilingual immigrant Beatriz (Hayek) and the red, the boorish super-rich real-estate mogul Doug Strutt (Lithgow). Who will come out on top? Surely not the audience.

The optimal title for this movie should have been Beatriz and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. She begins her morning feeding her dogs and calming her bleating pet lamb before driving down to work at a ramshackle clinic in downtown L.A.. She claims to be a healer - massage, reiki, rolfing - the kind of stuff that would sound like hokum if Beatriz wasn't so emphatically a believer. Her last task of the day involves a long drive to Malibu to meet with a wealthy client. Her car dies on the driveway, thus her hosts reluctantly invite her to a dinner they are throwing to celebrate a new business venture.

The movie's rising action unfolds largely as you would expect. The slight misreading of social cues and awkward culture clashes turn into a snowballing array of devilishly clever faux pas. The dinner itself, while never quite as caustic as it should be, nevertheless showcases the characters as a menagerie of conflicting personalities all containing themselves to conform to social graces.

Then much like Beatriz after one too many glasses of white wine, the movie just seems to forget itself. It sidesteps the character dynamics it so lovingly created and all but deflates any chance of investment. Beatriz and Doug by this point are no longer human but pallid adversarial mouthpieces that don't even talk at one another but through one another. And they do so in the most sanctimonious of ways, diluting what and how they think in the form of talking-points that'd be better served on someone's back bumper. "All tears flow from the same source;" "what the world needs is jobs;" "the world is dying;" "there's way more satisfaction in building things." These are the kinds of grandiose statements you can expect from this movie, dispensed like oh so many socio-political McNuggets.

By the end of the evening, it becomes clear that director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White have a thematic endgame in mind. What results is a conclusion that no doubt feels forced and too little too late, though given the film's lack of plot, it should get brownie points for actually getting us there. But once we do get there, the shallow vanity, vitriolic banter and the ever present power dynamics all seem to be beside the point. Much like Blue State (2007), Fast Food Nation (2006) and other such movies, Beatriz at Dinner isn't really a movie so much as it is an overt statement that forgot the cameras were rolling.

Have we seriously gotten to the point where we have forgotten how to do satire? Given the high-concept, Beatriz at Dinner could have been a less sophomoric version of The Last Supper (1995) with flutters of Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) painted in for good measure. Instead we're given a film that's just not enough of anything. It's not aggressive enough, its not satirical enough, it's not nuanced enough - heck it's not even sanctimonious enough! It's sits there in a drunken fugue, angrily seething before ambling away in a worrisome state. If I were you, I wouldn't encourage movies like this by following it.

Written by Mike White, Beatriz at Dinner completes an unofficial trilogy with the screenwriter's Year of the Dog and the HBO series Enlightened. All three of these works are about middle aged women searching for relevance in modern society via politics. This one is a bit smaller in scale, a bit less comedic, but it shares a lot of traits with the other film and TV series. Salma Hayek stars (and is fantastic) as a holistic healer and masseuse. She is called to a rich client's home, where her car breaks down after the job. Stuck there overnight, she is invited by the client (Connie Britton) to stay overnight and dine at their party. There's a bit of fish-out-of-water comedy here, but it's more painfully awkward than funny, and the class issues are at time gut wrenching. One of the other guests is a rich mogul (John Lithgow), whom Hayek seems to know from the past. Perhaps fate has brought them together for a reason? Lithgow is an obvious stand-in for Donald Trump. Frankly, all the wealthy characters, even the relatively friendly Britton, are despicable, but White doesn't do much to stack the deck against them. They certainly don't speak in any way that feels egregiously unfair. Lithgow definitely chews into the role, but, hey, so does Donald Trump. I'm not entirely satisfied with the ending, and I would say this is the weakest of the trilogy, but it's easily the most thoughtful and most thought-provoking film I've seen all summer. 8/10.

Just having funny and tragic elements in a movie doesn't make it dark comedy; that takes a careful and very talented touch. Think Death to Smoochy, Harold and Maude, or Mel Brooks' To Be or Not To Be. But Beatriz at Dinner is just an admixture of the extremes that beats you upside the head. You can't be sure what you're getting hit with, and the elements don't make a greater whole. The premise is a class contrast. Hayek's healer/masseuse is befriended and employed by a couple whose child she helped through the post-chemo misery of Hodgkin's cancer treatment. Her car breaks down at their wealthy-enclave home, and they invite her to stay for an important dinner with their super-wealthy patron. Hilarity and tragedy ensue. Weird moment that may demonstrate my point: Beatriz is portrayed both as a deep, sensitive and capable healer, and as an airhead. Someone at the dinner table describes a painful kidney stone incident, and, trying to contribute from her field of expertise, she chimes in with a holistic-sounding remedy, a tea made from beets, rhubarb, and dandelion flower. Those are on the rogue's list for kidney stone sufferers: they're among the six things that generate kidney stones at a rate 10 times more intense than the second tier of danger. So it could be an obscure inside joke, horrible research, or a loop they intended to close later but left on the cutting room floor.

I'm a great fan of Miguel Arteta and Mike White's work. They travel a road that will take us to unusual places. I don't know if unusual is the right word because all of a sudden everything seems familiar, perhaps is the way Arteta and White got us there that is unusual. Opposite worlds sitting at the same table. Selma Hayek is wonderful and every though that crosses her heart and mind is perfectly visible to us. John Lithgow finds a new and disturbing face to his gallery of startling characters and Connie Britton is sublime as the hostess walking a thin line between empathy and something else. Wow! It really grabbed me and shook me. So, a highly recommended movie trying to survive in a sea of Avengers and remakes. Bravo!