BEATRIZ AT DINNER: DINNER DOWNFALL

It’s easy to see when reading reviews for the movie BEATRIZ AT DINNER where the politics of those writing come into play. Before writing this I looked to see what others had written out of curiosity. What I found was for the most part what I expected. Those writing from more urban areas praised the film and its discussions on political topics that divide the country between red and blue states, with their beliefs firmly in the blue category. It’s a form of positive reviewing that looks at movies through a single window rather than stepping outside of the house and looking around.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a masseuse and holistic healer at a cancer patient facility in California. She also does house calls and has become a favored person in the home of Kathy and Grant (David Warshofsky and Connie Britton) whose daughter Tara was helped by Beatriz. Preparing for a big dinner party, Kathy has Beatriz come to her home to refresh her. She does so but when she tries to leave her car breaks down. Being nice Kathy invites her to be a part of the dinner party as well as spend the night until someone can come fix the car.

This is not a typical dinner at home. It is a meeting as well between Grant and business partners in a recent project. Alex and Shannon (Jay Duplass and Chloe Sevigny) are a young couple with Alex a lawyer on the rise. Doug and Jeana (John Lithgow and Amy Landecker) are a power couple, Doug being a billionaire builder or malls and hotels. Their all gathered together to celebrate a new mall their involved in.

Beatriz immediately becomes the outsider, the square peg in a round hole, among these guests. She approaches them during conversations and inserts her experience in uncomfortable moments for the rest while never recognizing their unease. They act polite, acknowledge her and continue on. That changes once dinner is served.

It is during dinner that Doug begins to pontificate how he became so successful, how there are times when a few eggs must be broken to make an omelet. During his speech Beatriz interrupts to talk about how her family was forced from their home by a hotel builder whose promises to the village were never kept and how everyone there was ruined, forced to move elsewhere. This back and forth between a blatant have and have not results in some discomforting moments between all.

This comes to an increased boiling point when after dinner over drinks Doug discusses an upcoming trip to Africa for a hunting safari. He shares a picture of a rhino he killed on a recent trip which sends Beatriz into a rage. Asked to leave the group with the suggestion of going to bed then, she does so but remains bothered. A few more back and forths between Beatriz and Doug happen leading to the films end of which I will say only it went nowhere.

The characters are so blatant here that you’d have to have lived in a cave not to recognize them. In the form of Doug many have already noted that he bears an uncanny resemblance personality wise to President Trump. There is no way this was unintentional. What’s sad is that he’s depicted as a one note character with every possible evil in the world heaped upon him from destroying towns to firing workers to killing the planet with pollution.

On the other hand Beatriz in her down to earth ways, her meditative stance, her joy at helping others deal with the pain of cancer and of healing some of them has been described in other reviews as “empath-like”, “deeply spiritual” and “Christ like”. She is an innocent among wolves who through drinking far too much wine (it appears to be more than a bottle or so) speaks out against them on their home turf.

The movie becomes a depiction of the battle between the haves and have nots, the upper and lower classes and an attack on white privilege. No deep discourse is offered with concepts and ideas replaced with bumper sticker mentality lines. Sure the actors perform well here but bring nothing to the characters. In the case of Hayek I will say seeing her in a more subdued form than the usual spitfire or highly temperamental characters she normally places was a nice change and displays that she can do more than those roles.

In the end I felt as if I’d watched a movie that was more intent on preaching to me than anything else. It wanted me to believe that those less fortunate than others are more noble in their pursuits and that anyone who seeks to further themselves does so only at the expense of others. I find that to be a bit of a simplistic attitude. Nothing is that black and white and there are good and bad people on both sides of most issues.

At 82 minutes there were moment that made the movie feel longer than that. And when it was over I found myself reflecting less on the issues raised in the film and felt more like I was being looked down upon by those who felt themselves above the rest of us peasants who just don’t understand what art is or how we should think on things. Oddly enough that was the same target those making the movie took aim at. In short, they failed by closing the door on a discussion in favor of preaching to the choir.

 
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