INDIGNATION, A BIT OVERDONE
Guess who’s coming to dinner? Classes clash in fun, but predictable fare
“I don’t build things. I just own them.” So says evil real-estate mogul Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) in Beatriz at Dinner. U.S. critics have made much of his presidential persona, especially since the movie first screened at Sundance just three days after the Trump inauguration. But I didn’t see a similarity. For one thing, Doug is able to pay attention to dinner conversation for an entire course at a time.
Doug is also a Bad Hombre. Over the course of the evening meal, we learn that he recently hunted a rare rhinoceros and plans to return to Africa for more big game; that he regularly tramples workers’ rights and opposes any increase in minimum wage; and that he is considering titling his memoirs Life Is a Game and Guess Who Won? He arrives in the company of his third, much younger wife.
Beatriz, played by Salma Hayek with no makeup, a bad haircut and as unflattering an outfit as it’s possible to put her in, is a Good Woman. She’s a professional healer whose biggest regret in life seems to be that she can’t help everyone.
Her modest car (which breaks down at a wealthy client’s house, requiring her to stay for this dinner) sports Christian and Buddhist icons on the inside, while the bumper tells people: “Have a Nice Day, Unless You’ve Made Other Plans.” She has a pet goat, for heaven’s sake!
The dinner hosts are Cathy and Grant (Connie Britton, David Warshofsky), whose daughter Beatriz once helped through a bout with cancer. The daughter is now off at university, and Mom couldn’t be happier that she’s mixing with gays and trans and Jews: “She’s having a great experience!” Cathy burbles.
Another couple, (Chloë Sevigny and Jay Duplass) are shameless social climbers. And so writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta (previously collaborations: Chuck & Buck; The Good Girl) have stocked their barrel with fish, then proceed to hand Beatriz a loaded shotgun. The resulting melee is definitely fun to watch, but it’s a bit too easy.
What tension there is in the movie comes from Hayek’s performance. Beatriz is a Mexican immigrant — “Did you come legally?” Doug asks tactlessly — and the least easy character to pigeonhole. (Sadly, none of the others deviates from their one-per-cent playbook.) Offered a glass of wine at the start of evening, she quickly has a second, and then a third.
When the picture of the dead rhino gets passed around on Doug’s phone, her response is to chuck it across the room. She alternates between quiet outrage — “Are you for real?” — and even an even quieter calmness that is thrilling precisely because we don’t know when (or if ) it will snap.
About two-thirds of the way through this dinner, I found myself worried that the film wouldn’t let loose, or allow itself to surprise me. And by the time it was over, those fears had been justified. Beatriz at Dinner is an angry condemnation of wilful, well-to-do blindness. But I wish it displayed more teeth and claws.
The super-rich, rhino-hunting, golf-course-owning fat cats of the world can surely take it.
What tension there is … comes from Hayek’s performance. Beatriz is … the least easy character to pigeonhole.