The 2016 election was not just a political event. More than any one before it in the United States, the election was also a cultural event. Across Europe and other democracies, it’s long been considered normal to bring up politics in conversation. In America, however, politics rarely made their way into average dialogue. As a teacher once told me, the only safe topics of conversation with a stranger on an airplane were sports and the weather.
But now the spillover is unavoidable. We must talk about them. We can avoid it no longer. In Miguel Arteta’s “Beatriz at Dinner,” we get cinema’s first big movie about how those conversations will look – faux pas and all. (I specify “cinema” because television, with its shorter production schedule, struck while the iron was significantly hotter.)
The movie runs just 83 minutes but manages to cover a lot of ground as it leads up to the rupture of its titular character, Salma Hayek’s massage therapist and apparent “miracle worker.” After providing services for a long-standing client, Connie Britton’s well-meaning Cathy, Beatriz’s car breaks down in the driveway. Cathy, rather than shooing her off to wait with the help, invites her to dine with the family as her husband celebrates a big deal with business partners.
Well-intentioned though the offer from Cathy is, the wincing that ensues shows just how hollow her notion of cross-class communication stands at our current moment. John Lithgow’s unapologetic capitalist boor Doug Strutt makes the obvious cinematic mistake of mistaking Beatriz for a server and asks for another drink. (Of course, this has to happen.) But more than just casual racist biases emerge over the course of the evening. We see the pain of microaggressions against Beatriz as they roll casually off their tongues and jab into her dignity, many of which come courtesy of the younger married couple who we’d believe should “know better.” We observe the different feeling rules they maintain, both in terms of personal greetings as well as in the larger sense of who deserves sympathy and consideration.
What to do with all these issues the film raises? Now that the politics of land exploitation, pollution and racial resentment are part of our cultural drinking water, we can’t just put “Beatriz at Dinner” in a box and walk away. Personally, I’m not sure – and the movie isn’t either. That’s not a problem, per se, but people give their time and money for Arteta and writer Mike White to have some idea.
Rather than draw conclusions or propose resolutions, they punt any difficult decisions in a bafflingly ambiguous third act. For a film that’s so fastidiously grounded in the real world during tense conversations, it swerves jarringly into fantasy and metaphor as it ends. But maybe at this stage in our ongoing national dialogue, if such a thing exists, bizarre irresolution is the only fitting close. B- / 
Marshall and the Movies 
“As a teacher once told me, the only safe topics of conversation with a stranger on an airplane were sports and the weather.”
That word “safe” has always puzzled and intrigued me, especially when educators use it.
“For a film that’s so fastidiously grounded in the real world during tense conversations, it swerves jarringly into fantasy and metaphor as it ends. But maybe at this stage in our ongoing national dialogue, if such a thing exists, bizarre irresolution is the only fitting close.”
Yes. But the fundamental disagreement between Lithgow’s and Hayek’s characters (and the real people they represent, of course) seems to lie in what the “real world” actually is and, consequently, how we should live life.
I love a “people stuck in a house film,” family or not. With lots of food and alcohol.
“Safe” is my word. The talk was ~10 years ago, so I could definitely be making that up!
And excellent point re: “real world” disparities. I definitely took that away from the film, but I was just left with such whiplash from the sharp turn it took!
You may not have made that up. I was not shocked to read it, as I have heard many educators make comments like that.
I think both sides of the debate think the other side lives in a sort of “fantasy world,” and when describing their views, they describe them in a metaphorical sense or seem to want to return to some time and place that better suits how they view the world now. Therefore, I apply the label “head in the clouds” to Lithgow’s character as well, even though such a quality would usually only be attributed to people like Beatriz. In this sense I think that maybe the turn the film takes isn’t as “sharp” as it appears. We’re always sitting in metaphors and “dreaminess.”