But oh boy does it snap to life like a defibrillated heart attack patient when it finally arrives at its whole raison de'tre.......a crackling collision of personalities, cultures and mindsets when an emotionally wounded Mexican immigrant, Beatriz (Salma Hayek) ends up sharing a dinner table with a rapacious, entitled real estate tycoon (John Lithgow), who functions as a Macy's Parade balloon version of Donald Trump.
Beatriz, a massage therapist at an alternate medicine cancer center, still regularly visits the fabulous California mansion of a wealthy couple, Sarah and Grant (Connie Britton, David Warshofsky) whose daughter she helped heal from Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
After providing a therapy session for Sarah (they've established a faux-friendly, Plantation Master & House Slave relationship), Beatriz's car breaks down, with no hope of a tow truck any time soon. Expansive in her condescension, Sarah invites Beatriz to stay for a formal catered dinner.....to which they've invited the architects of their latest lucrative real estate deal......
Arriving with their trophy wives in tow come young exec Alex (Jay Duplass) and the notorious Doug Strutt (Lithgow), the king of all toxic, greedy, environment-destroying con-man developers. (We're surmising that screenwriter Mike White borrowed Strutt's name as a homage to Martin Gabel's piggish, outraged businessman from Hitchcock's "Marnie")
The characters of Strutt and Alex look and sound like they were Frankensteined together from generous chunks of Trump and his equally loathsome Mini-Me, Don Jr.......
Lithgow, however, is too skilled and gifted an actor to settle for an easy "Saturday Night Live"-type caricature. He deepens and digs into Strutt, creating a fascinating, fully dimensional view of a predatory monster........unlike the clueless Trump, Doug Strutt carries himself with a sardonic self-awareness of his evil nature and his place in the world.
For a few electrically charged scenes, Strutt meets his match in Beatriz, a woman who's spent a lifetime absorbing the pain and sorrow of her patients, as well as her own traumatic youth.....(her family and home were possibly ripped asunder by one of Strutt's hotel projects). Hayek shines brilliantly here, portraying a woman who's both warmly empathetic and an annoying, scolding, sanctimonious bore.....all at the same time. Couple that with Lithgow's smooth, smarmy ice-cold bonhomie and you've got the makings of a world class epic showdown.
In the couple of Clash-Of-The-Titans scenes they're allowed, Hayek and Lithgow don't disappoint......you'll alternately squirm, laugh and gasp as you watch them. Lithgow's Strutt, unlike the thin-skinned, whiny toddler he's based on, has a hide tougher than the dead Rhino he hunted and killed in Africa, whose picture he proudly displays to a horrified Beatriz. Beatriz, with all of her righteous humanity and broken-hearted disgust, can't ever penetrate the invincible force field of Strutt's self-satisfaction and ego......(Strutt would never waste time tweet-storming Beatriz with insults.......her rage washes over him like a mild rain shower...)
There might have been one amazing, incredible movie about these two characters......but it sure as hell isn't "Beatriz At Dinner". Major portions of its running time get frittered away in the usual laborious Independent film tropes of artful camera shots that exist only to load the film up with artful camera shots.....
By the time the film's final moments collapse into pointless visual gibberish, you realize you've been had.......the filmmakers weren't out to tell a compelling story about these people..
....they only hoped to suck up awards from easily impressed film festival juries.....
We'll serve up 2 stars for this dinner (**),strictly for Hayek and Lithgow.......a real shame....these two and their carefully crafted characters deserved a movie worthy of them.
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