Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Mexican-born physical therapist at a medical treatment center in Los Angeles. She also has private clients, including the socialite in whose driveway her aging Volkswagen breaks down. So she stays to dinner, the 7th guest at a table of plutocrats.
So the next thing to say is, I get it. It's 2017, and we're watching a movie about a female immigrant at a table of Donald Trumps' peers. That might make for a fine satire or allegory, which, I think, was the intent. In the hands of Miguel Aterta, it is not the result.
Beatriz keeps dogs and goats in the city, to the understandable annoyance of her neighbor, whom she accuses of killing one of the goats. Her dashboard has both a Buddha and a crucifix. When she lists her professional healing skills, I began to wonder if she was delusional because she reels off a substantial list that includes massage, Reiki, and Rolfing. The script presents her as an exquisitely sensitive individual, but sensitivity does not inform her actions toward the people she meets. If there's one word for her, it's judgmental. If you want another, humorless.
She has little self-control, not with drinking, nor even with managing basic courtesy when you're a guest in someone's home. She controls her emotions to the extent that she only imagines murdering the real estate mogul (John Lithgow), but not enough to prevent her own suicide.
Yes, like a 21st century Norman Maine, she walks drunkenly into the Pacific Ocean at the end. One dinner with six wealthy white Americans sends her over the edge. And those six people are thinly drawn as stereotypes of plutocrats. There is not an ounce of fresh observation; only Lithgow's performance lifts him above his simplistic character. Yet one evening with land barons drives Beatriz to commit suicide? That's not mental health. Nor is it sympathetic. When she wades into the Pacific to drown, I was left wondering who would take care of her abandoned dogs and the remaining goat, because I cared a good deal more about them than about her. And P. S., she apparently didn't give her pets a second thought either.
Beatriz is meant to be seen as enlightened, but she is darkness personified. She has one speech in which she says it is easy to create by destroying, but the real work is to heal or fix the things that are being destroyed. That is a worthy theme, but Beatriz is hardly admirable flag-bearer for it. Contrary to the way I believe the filmmakers wanted the audience to respond, I actually began to have some sympathy for-- or anyway, identify with-- the oligarchs who had to contend with the intransigent, and apparently mentally disturbed, woman in their midst.
So the next thing to say is, I get it. It's 2017, and we're watching a movie about a female immigrant at a table of Donald Trumps' peers. That might make for a fine satire or allegory, which, I think, was the intent. In the hands of Miguel Aterta, it is not the result.
Beatriz keeps dogs and goats in the city, to the understandable annoyance of her neighbor, whom she accuses of killing one of the goats. Her dashboard has both a Buddha and a crucifix. When she lists her professional healing skills, I began to wonder if she was delusional because she reels off a substantial list that includes massage, Reiki, and Rolfing. The script presents her as an exquisitely sensitive individual, but sensitivity does not inform her actions toward the people she meets. If there's one word for her, it's judgmental. If you want another, humorless.
She has little self-control, not with drinking, nor even with managing basic courtesy when you're a guest in someone's home. She controls her emotions to the extent that she only imagines murdering the real estate mogul (John Lithgow), but not enough to prevent her own suicide.
Yes, like a 21st century Norman Maine, she walks drunkenly into the Pacific Ocean at the end. One dinner with six wealthy white Americans sends her over the edge. And those six people are thinly drawn as stereotypes of plutocrats. There is not an ounce of fresh observation; only Lithgow's performance lifts him above his simplistic character. Yet one evening with land barons drives Beatriz to commit suicide? That's not mental health. Nor is it sympathetic. When she wades into the Pacific to drown, I was left wondering who would take care of her abandoned dogs and the remaining goat, because I cared a good deal more about them than about her. And P. S., she apparently didn't give her pets a second thought either.
Beatriz is meant to be seen as enlightened, but she is darkness personified. She has one speech in which she says it is easy to create by destroying, but the real work is to heal or fix the things that are being destroyed. That is a worthy theme, but Beatriz is hardly admirable flag-bearer for it. Contrary to the way I believe the filmmakers wanted the audience to respond, I actually began to have some sympathy for-- or anyway, identify with-- the oligarchs who had to contend with the intransigent, and apparently mentally disturbed, woman in their midst.