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.
