Things Go Wrong with ‘Beatriz at Dinner’ in All the Right Ways

The hyper-partisan times we’re living have led to a number of uncomfortable dinners across the nation. Thanksgivings have been ruined. Families and friendships have been strained over the mounting political tensions of the time. While not exactly a family situation, the awkward dinner at the heart of the new film from director Miguel Arteta, Beatriz at Dinner, ramps up the tensions in a fascinating way, one that provides plenty of laughs as well as thought provoking situations that speak to the broader struggles of our times.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a worker in alternative medicine just outside of Santa Monica in California. She spends her days providing various treatments to cancer patients, ranging from massage to sound therapy. On this particular day, though, she has to battle the dense traffic and drive south to Newport Beach, where she’ll be giving a massage to Cathy (Connie Britton) before her big dinner party this evening. But Beatriz beat up car won’t start and Cathy decides to invite Beatriz to stay for dinner despite the objections of her grouchy husband Grant (David Warshofsky). Beatriz and her hosts will be joined by Shannon (Chloë Sevigny) and Alex (Jay Duplass) as well as the mogul and billionaire Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) and his wife, Jeana (Amy Landecker). The spiritual and alternative thinking of Beatriz doesn’t exactly go over well with the group gathered before her, a group of people that are either masters of the universe, driven by immense love of late capitalism, or their privileged wives.

Compounding matters, Beatriz has this sneaking suspicion that the driven capitalistic tendencies of Doug Strutt may have been responsible for her forced relocation from her home in Mexico as a child, leading to more and more of impassioned defense of the competing worldviews in the coastal mansion.

There’s a history between Cathy and Beatriz, with the Mexican healer having given treatments to their daughter in the past when all hope seemed lost. To a certain extent, Beatriz does have a single friend in the awkward situation. The confrontational manner that Beatriz takes with Doug Strutt, who is also a business partner of the dinner party’s host, strains that cordial relationship as the tensions mount.

Miguel Arteta takes his time in getting all the pieces in place before ramping Beatriz at Dinner into a full-fledged comedy. We get the sense of Beatriz’s struggles with finances by the whirring strain her car makes when she starts it. We get the sense of her spiritual side, be it at work or at home. When she’s finally injected into this situation where she’s confronted by those who put a premium on making money above all else, it opens the door for some hilarious conversations led by Hayek as the wide-eyed idealist fighting against the very thing that everyone around her is celebrating. The mental state of the lead character is further emphasized by flashback and dream-like sequences that take her back to the place of her childhood, before a certain land developer displaced her from her home to set up a luxury resort. You don’t have to subscribe to alternative medicine to understand Beatriz’s worldview because the comedy is rooted in the extremes that are seated across from one another.

The tension that builds between Lithgow’s ruthless capitalist and Hayek’s idealistic healer builds and builds as the movie progress, but the laughs build as well. Beatriz at Dinner is an extremely funny movie even though there are stretches where the laughs subside as it builds towards the next big hilarious outburst. It’s also important that the screenplay by Mike White doesn’t create Doug Strutt as this kind of be-all blanketed bad guy conservative, but allows the character and Lithgow’s performance especially to bring his driven personality beyond simple archetypes.

The ending of Beatriz at Dinner features a number of misdirections from director Miguel Arteta, and the film’s conclusion embraces a certain level of ambiguity that some may turn off some viewers. Personally, I wasn’t particularly fond of the film’s ending but I do respect Arteta uncompromising embrace of an ambiguous ending.

The confrontation of Beatriz’s kindness and Doug’s callousness present an amusing portrait of situation that’s playing out in all different forms across America right now. Beatriz at Dinner is a movie that deals with topics of a political nature without feeling an overt polemic, and that’s simply because the characters are well-defined and the laughs, though sparse, are big. Beatriz at Dinner is a dark comedy that will haunt your thoughts well after you’ve had the last laugh.