Butler's Cinema Scene

Connie Britton, Salma Hayek

“BEATRIZ AT DINNER” My rating: C+

83 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Beatriz at Dinner” might be called a comedy of discomfort.

Actually, there’s a lot more discomfort than comedy.

Scripted by Mike White (“The Good Girl”) and directed by Miguel Arteta (a veteran of numerous TV seres), “Beatriz” offers a fish-out-of-water scenario brimming over with class, race and political implications.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek, sans makeup and sporting a mildly horrifying set of bangs) is a New Age-y therapist whose skills run from your standard massage to aura readings.  On this particularly day she has schlepped out from her headquarters in Pasadena to see to the needs of one of her richest (and, it seems, most demanding) clients.

Cathy (Connie Britton) lives in a gated community with an ocean view, along with her high-rolling husband Grant (David Warshofsky). She’s preparing to host a dinner that night and feels a desperate need for some hands-on work from the talented Beatriz.  (It says volumes that Cathy is stressed when all she really had to do was decide on a menu. Household servants and a caterer do all the real work.)

With the massage session over, Beatriz prepares to drive home, only to find that her car won’t start.  Cathy — who credits Beatriz’s therapies with getting her daughter through a bout with cancer — graciously suggests that the masseuse join the other guests for the evening.

John Lithgow

Despite being introduced by Cathy as “my dear friend Beatriz,” it’s clear that we’re talking apples and cantaloups. The other guests (Chloe Savigny, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass) are all rich and self-satisfied.

And one of them, Doug Strutt (John Lithgow), is a famous/notorious real estate billionaire with a reputation for breaking rules. (Lithgow doesn’t attempt a Trump imitation, but it’s impossible not to see the Great Orange One as a major inspiration for the character.)

So the men discuss the art of the deal, the women make rich matron small talk, and Beatriz –getting a bit tipsy to counter her insecurities — interrupts every now and then to relate one of her spiritual encounters.  It’s all the rich folk can do not to roll their eyes.

But when Doug whips out photos of his big game hunts, the animal-loving Beatriz goes ballistic. And from that point on things get seriously weird.

Narratively White has written himself into a corner from which there is no easy escape, and one is likely to leave “Beatriz” feeling dissatisfied with the ending.

Along the way, though, there are some devastatingly sharp observations about the way rich people see themselves and the world.

Cathy, for instance, is mildly perturbed that her daughter has chosen to go to a public university in the Midwest, but comforts herself with the knowledge that the girl is meeting all sorts of new people: “The gays, the trans…her roommate is a Jewish girl from New York.”

Lithgow’s Doug — after mistaking Beatriz for one of the servants — wants to know if she’s an illegal.

And the ladies commiserate about how difficult it is to choose an appropriate vacation destination.

The film doesn’t let Beatriz off the hook, either. She operates in her own little bubble of woo-woo, as smugly satisfied with her own perceptions of reality as the other dinner guests are with theirs.

| Robert W. Butler