"Beatriz at Dinner": Parable for Our Time?

Film Review: “Beatriz at Dinner”: Parable for Our Time?

I’m an admirer of Selma Hayek’s acting and of the beautiful Pacific coastline that co-stars in this film. The philosophy that script writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta convey through their lead, Beatriz—the calm and spiritual, yet lonely and angry healer, companion to and lover of non-human animals—is one I feel an affinity with: death is a part of life that we need to accept, as it includes all of us in its ocean-like tides. While we should strive—like Beatriz—to accept it, with sadness, when it comes naturally, we also—like Beatriz—should push back against unnatural death: the blatant murder of both human and non-human animals and the deaths that come through abuses of power and reckless disregard, visited by many in power, like real estate magnate Doug Strutt (John Lithgow). Belching smokestacks, poor people thrown off their land, large exotic jungle animals killed by safari-goers like Strutt, who declares his takedown of a rhinoceros is not “murder”; “it’s like this dance of man and beast…” he boasts, in an attempt to make his sport into a meaningful, religious exercise of becoming one with nature. Beatriz, in a very different way, is shown to be at one with nature, through the repeated images of her slowly, steadily paddling a canoe on a river. Whether these are her memories, a metaphor for her belief in the spiritual blending of humans with the planet’s very arteries, or some sort of foreshadowing, they serve to mark her as wholly different from Strutt.

For all of its strong points, however, this film lacks the subtlety that would make it more artful and thoughtful and thought-provoking. In our polarized time, viewers will likely either agree with the immigrant Beatriz or with the businessman Strutt. Its explicit plot is too black and white, and in that falls short as a drama in the realist strain, which is how it looks on the surface. The rich people at the dinner are largely just caricatures of sad, soul-less people, lacking the self-awareness to recognize that their lives contain nothing without the expensive things with which they surround and feed themselves. Beatriz’s massage client, Kathy (Connie Britten), who asks her to stay for dinner when her car breaks down, is drawn a bit more fully. Beatriz helped care for Kathy and her husband Grant’s teen-aged daughter when the daughter had cancer. She now makes the long drive to give Kathy massages in her gated mansion. Kathy is appreciative of all Beatriz did for her daughter and tries at first to form a bridge between her wealthy husband and guests and Beatriz, but is clearly pained by these two parts of her life together in the same space. Ultimately, she must side with the source of all her wealth. The script doesn’t give the characters the room needed to fully explore all of these tensions.

But, all of that is pertinent if we watch this as something that would really happen. If we watch this film, however, as a parable, it makes a different kind of sense. Until the end, there are only small signs to suggest this way of reading “Beatriz at Dinner”: the recurring canoeing footage most prominent of them. It isn’t until close to the end, when Beatriz is banished to an upstairs bedroom for an outburst against Strutt, that more clues slip in: the rich white folks lighting their sky lanterns to float above the ocean, Beatriz’s repeated, unsuccessful attempts to reach a friend in Mexico by phone, two alternative scenes of ritualized violence that play out one right after the other, and the finale. Without giving the ending away, I’ll say that the parable’s moral gets driven home with these images of the rich, powerful, and exploitative having each other as they send their fire up into the California sky (the same California that as I write this is burning from out-of-control wildfires.) Reminiscent of Daisy and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, “they were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

It is people like Beatriz--who cares for people sick from the pollution chugging out of the smokestacks, protects animals who are objects of sport for others—and Kathy and Grant’s Mexican maid who often do the cleaning up. And, yet they are not portrayed as a group, as those who support each other. Toward the end of the evening, the maid sees Beatriz and asks her how the dinner was; Beatriz just smiles and says that what was anything but nice and fine went well. While those who “belong” at the dinner have the unity of each other’s company as they watch their beautiful, yet potentially dangerous, creations float above them, Beatriz only has her cell phone, through which she desperately tries to reach someone she can relate to. But that someone is never there; she has the memory or the metaphor of a solitary boat ride in those images; she views photos of Kathy’s and Grant’s daughter, smiling as she remembers her time with the girl, but she is off at college. Which side would she be on were she there?

Ultimately, my take-away message from Arteta and White’s work is that it’s lonely being a social justice warrior and that those with the money and the power are going to prevail. I felt a gloomy sadness after it was over. Is that sadness supposed to accompany a recognition of how our society is pretty hopeless? Or is it supposed to inspire a move to bring those who would fight, who would speak truth to power-- as Beatriz does to Strout—together? Or is it a drama that wants to do more than the film makers could manage? I’m still not sure.