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.