Beatriz at Dinner comes out of the tradition of movies about unwanted guests – The Man Who Came to Dinner, Celebration, the riotous Dogme 95 movie by Thomas Vinterberg, even Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The best of the bunch is probably Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie, which doesn’t have an unwanted guest exactly, but it does have a bunch of well-to-do people trying to put on a decorous dinner party in spite of a world riddled with rebellion and explosions.
That’s pretty much what happens in Beatriz at Dinner. Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a holistic healer who comes to the home of a frequent client, Cathy (Connie Britton) to give her a massage. Sometime before, Beatriz had treated Cathy’s daughter who had cancer. Beatriz’s car won’t start, so Cathy invites her to stay for dinner – with a small group of wealthy, self-satisfied white people who make their money by developing resorts and other things in Third World countries. Beatriz often disappears into her nostalgic dreams for her childhood home in lush, rural Mexico – just the kind of place where these dinner guests love to put golf courses.
It’s no surprise that Cathy’s dinner party does not go well. Beatriz finds Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) an intolerable, arrogant jerk, He finds her naïve and unimportant. They instantly don’t get along, but shy, reserved Beatriz turns out to have a taste for combat with this guy – in between moments of apology and self-recrimination.
Beatriz says all the things that many of us wish we had either the imagination or the nerve to say to smug, entitled people. And while Cathy, her jerk of a husband and the other guests are angry and appalled, Doug rather likes the confrontation. And you get the sense that these two characters spark with each other. It may be that they’re the only two characters in the movie with any life in them; it may also be that Salma Hayek and John Lithgow have a lot more talent and pizazz than the other actors.
But Beatriz at Dinner isn’t up to its potentials. It’s a didactic, moralistic film that isn’t interested in either debate or a searching conversation. It knows where it stands and expects the audience to stand there with it. Unfortunately, moral certainty doesn’t often make for good art. As the great French filmmaker Agnes Varda is fond of saying, “I’m not the postwoman. I don’t deliver messages.”
When Beatriz dreams of her home, it’s in languorous images, as if from a small boat on a slow, quiet river. The vegetation is thick; you feel the weight of huge leaves and also the humidity as the boat takes a route full of unexpected turns that open onto more magnificent stretches of the patient river. The natural beauty of the Earth feels sacred.
Cathy’s home outside Los Angeles stands behind a huge gate, like a palace, completely divorced from nature. Its colors tend toward cool pinks and oranges. It’s all unforgiving hard edges and cold surfaces. The work Beatriz does in a cancer clinic involves touching people and exploring human connections. Doug’s work involves hiring people to eradicate indigenous populations and drive bulldozers across the land. Beatriz sits in placid silence while Doug talks constantly, certain of his truths.
The two actors may give off a sense of possibility in spite of the heavy-handed setup, but director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White don’t seem to notice. They’re locked into their rigid sense of good and evil, and that’s where the movie sits. The two characters may confront one another, but the film doesn’t let them engage. Beatriz at Dinner seems afraid that the two opposite characters may find each other attractive; they might violate their principles and make human contact that could give the audience some discomfort and maybe even drive a few people out of their certainties, and make a far better film than what shows up on screen.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the film.
