A Search for America's Soul

When a movie moves you deeply, you know there is a connection of lived experience. Beatriz at Dinner will be one of these movies for you if you are a member of the working class, if you are a mid-career struggling professional woman, if you are a Latino immigrant and, overall, if you have a heart.

Puerto Rican Director Miguel Arteta joins writer Mike White, with whom he made The Good Girl, to skillfully take to the screen a powerful script about the abyss between the very rich and unscrupulous and… the rest of us. What takes the film into a category of its own are the two actors that personify our society’s class and race conflict: Salma Hayeck and John Lithgow; no need to say who personifies what. While both are naturally amazing in their roles, Ms. Hayeck is downright superb. She is our heart and soul.

As the title indicates, the story develops at a dinner given for a wealthy real estate mogul who has razed, devastated and destroyed his way to wealth, played by Lithgow. Ms. Hayeck’s character, Beatriz Luna, is obviously accidentally present. 

The supporting actors to these two pillars are also subtly great -David Warshofsky, Chloë Sevigny, Connie Britton, Amy Landecker- and each contributes to the ebb and flow of tension that slowly builds throughout the film. But it is Ms. Hayeck’s soulful eyes and Mr. Lithgow’s soulless ones that give witness to the philosophies that are in such opposition in today’s world between those that care and those that don’t and for who the world is, as they say, “their oyster”. The critics have called this an allegory of the Trump-era.

You can almost hear Ms. Hayeck’s thoughts, as old as scripture, as she struggles to contain the feelings Lithgow’s character evokes in her (an “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God”- Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25). This is an ancient conflict between those that amass wealth with voracious and insatiable greed and those that are constantly and painfully sorting through the debris the former leave behind.

That this now feels like the political scenario in the United States only makes this movie more relevant. We leave the theater knowing how true it is that we, the declining middle class, struggling immigrants, working women, seem powerless when confronted with the enormity of men like the character played by Lithgow. This is a man who cares nothing for his fellow human beings, who lives only for the present and his “highs”; a man who is catered to and pampered by those that make wealth for and from him. These are the ones lobbying for their interests and  looking to loophole their way through any legal system. We read about it in the papers on a daily basis these days. So the movie will feel like the clear and present danger we face.

Maybe that’s why we love Beatriz at Dinner just that much more; we’re reminded of who these people we’re taught to admire and envy really are. We are glad that there are movie makers out there that are skillful enough to bring that much reality and reflection to a dinner party. 

Guess Who’s Staying Past Dinner.

A half a century after Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), the Sidney Poitier - Katherine Hepburn - Spencer Tracy drama about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is released; a movie about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents. This time it’s a horror movie, which says a lot about racism and persistent attitudes towards interracial relationships in America. Looking back on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in its own way it too could be considered a horror movie. The blatant racism of the Hepburn/Tracy white parents towards the gentle, good looking, intelligent, humanistic, and all around amazing young doctor that is played by the talented Sidney Poitier is nothing if not horrific.

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get Out

As we contemplate the great divide in today’s America, without a doubt we find privilege and oppression at its core and, in particular, racism and sexism. It would probably take new treaties on social change (or lack thereof) to explain how in the twenty-first century we are unable to move past these systems of oppression. But thank heavens there are movies! Movies, like Peele’s Get Out, which use parody and symbolism so wondrously that, well, while maybe not being able to explain the why, certainly make it easy for those who have lived oppression to perceive the how. 

Jordan Peele said, of his directorial debut: “"It was very important to me to just get the entire audience in touch in some way with the fears inherent [in] being black in this country, (…) part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that ... we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism."

Ruth Nega and Joel Edgerton in Loving

There have been a number of movies that have addressed the issue of racism through the lens of interracial relationships, most recently Jeff Nicol’s Loving (2016), the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose legal battle against Virginia laws banning interracial marriages led to a Supreme Court decision; a movie that received various Oscar nominations this Oscar season. Other notables include Todd Hayne’s Far from Heaven (2002) about a housewife (Julianne Moore) who falls in love with a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) while going through the pain of discovering her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Their interracial love is the real taboo in this melodrama set in the 1950’s. Marc Forester’s Monster’s Ball (2001), for which Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar, is a dark story about a white racist jail guard (Billy Bob Thorton) who falls in love with the black woman who is the spouse of man on death row.  

Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven

Others worth mentioning  include Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993), Richard Benjamin’s Made In America (1993), a comedy with  the then real-life interracial couple Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson; or Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), a thriller which is also a sci-fi romance, made great not by the script as much as by the passion with which the beautiful couple that is Ralph Fiennes and Angela Basset play out their relationship; this movie is a particular favorite of mine for just this reason and because the relationship here is never in question for the race of the couple (it takes place, after all, in the future).

Angela Bassett  and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days

With the exception of Strange Days, the other movies were directed by white men. While they are good movies, all worth seeing, they were made by people who contemplate the system of racial oppression but have not lived the experience.  This marks a big difference. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote so well many years ago about the black experience (also applicable to other discriminated groups):

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

That is why movies about interracial relationships made by black men or women are so much more honest, real and strong.  In Get Out the black/white relationship is a metaphor; the movie is about the dangers that black men navigate in a society that is most definitely not post-racial. Black directors have tended towards comedy when addressing interracial relationships, maybe to make sure we understand that it is not the romance that is being examined, but rather the context of racism. Such is the case of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) about a successful black businessman (Wesley Snipes) who begins an affair with his white coworker (Annabella Sciorra), or Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s Guess Who? (2005) in which a young black woman (Zoe Saldana) brings home her boyfriend (Ashton Kutcher) to meet her parents; it is Bernie Mac  and Kutcher's relationship and their racial conflict that is under the lens (Bernie Mac is particularly great in this movie).

Jordan’s Peele Get Out also uses comedy, as could be expected from one half of the brilliant Key and Peele comedic duo. It is the strength of the movie that it doesn’t fit into a single genre, and while this may not be a work of art-house film making, it is most certainly an original, more so because of the strong social commentary that is presented in such a creative way.  

Movie critics and, most importantly, the audience, are dissecting the movie, finding all the hidden and not-so-hidden messages. The movie has exploded on social media. And this is good. This is what needs to occur. People are talking about this divide, this open wound in America that will not heal until there is a willingness to surrender privilege, denounce the barbarism that is racism and sexism, and recognize and respect everyone’s humanity.