BEATRIZ AT DINNER & Trump At The Movies

In movies such as the pro-nuclear “let them fight” Godzilla: King of the Monsters and the paranoid, overcharged gun ballet John Wick 3: Parabellum, the multiplex is a helpful litmus test for gauging our national climate. It’s hard not to see Avengers: Endgame and read the tyrannical Thanos as a Trumpian figure, his skin purple instead of orange. And immediately after casting Alec Baldwin, known for his Donald Trump impressions on Saturday Night Live, as the lead in The Boss Baby, you’re making a political film.

No movie is made in a bubble, and with incendiary politics dividing the United States, it’s high time we see the development of Trump-reactionary cinema, the same way that by 2004, Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, She Hate Me and The Day After Tomorrow rose up in response to George W. Bush. But some of the standout films that seemed built to respond to and push back against Trump were conceived before he announced his candidacy, so they can hardly be relevant to the daily unpredictable terror of his presidency.

Hollywood Responds To Donald Trump

2017’s Battle of the Sexes held up a magnifying glass to misogyny and male chauvinism in the 1970s tennis world as a way of analyzing these trends in modern American society. Critics were quick to point out the similarities to the 2016 elections — “Imagine Hillary and Trump Swinging Rackets,” challenged the headline from Rolling Stone. Yet the project was announced a few months before Trump even threw his hat into the presidential ring. Logan Lucky, set in the heart of pro-Trump territory, was announced a few months before Battle of the Sexes, and the concept and script for Get Out, the most prescient cultural smackdown since Trump took office, had been marinating for far longer.

Mid-budgeted films The Post (which debuted in time for Christmas 2017) and BlacKkKlansman (premiering at Cannes 2018) garnered the most recognition for responding directly to the Trump presidency. Both films would have undergone the majority of their rewrites and pre-production while Trump campaigned, won and spent his first few months in office. They’re effectively some of the first landmark Trump-reactionary films we have so far. (Details about BlacKkKlansman’s screenwriting history are vague, however. For all we know, the “America first” stuff was written on the day.)

Unlike Battle of the Sexes and Logan Lucky, which had budgets in the $25- and $30-million range like The Post while Get Out was far cheaper, these movies were able to adapt their stories and executions for a Trump presidency. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris probably had neither the time nor the budget to retool Battle of the Sexes, and even if they did, what would they include? A scene where Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs claims he wants to make tennis great again?

As for blockbusters, the Marvel origin stories for Carol Danvers and T’Challa are easily the most political of Marvel’s 20-odd features. But Captain Marvel had been in its workshopping phase as early as 2013, and Black Panther was being developed since 2005. Filming on Ryan Coogler’s Wakanda-set superhero epic began the month Trump was sworn into office.

Moviegoers with politics on the brain expect the cinema to change parallel to the real world, but change comes more slowly for Hollywood. Screenwriting and pre-production, at their least complicated, are months-long processes, and they only get longer the bigger a project is. John Wick 3’s horseback swordfight scenes don’t, hopefully, get planned the day of shooting. Because of the lengthy timeline of film production, the movies we believe to be responding to Trump’s politics are only doing so because we read them as such — or because they’re in dialogue with issues that far predate Trump.

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner

In January 2017, when the political-minded drama Beatriz at Dinner ran the Sundance gamut, critics were overjoyed to have discovered a film that seemed to directly respond to Trump’s victory and politics. Ethan Alter of Yahoo! Entertainment called it “the first great film of the Trump era.” The movie’s marketing team since embraced that praise and slapped it on every advertisement. As far as Trump-reactionary films go, Beatriz at Dinner is easily the first big, blatant, theme-heavy movie to debut about the subject, so it effectively leads the charge.

Director Miguel Arteta of Enlightened, Duck Butter and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day fame — wherein “fame” is a word used somewhat sarcastically — executes the story of Beatriz at Dinner with all the nuance of a chamber play yet all the poise of a buttered duck flapping and flailing about. The film can and should be championed for its ambitions and what it represents more than for how it gets there. It is at its worst a horribly unsubtle movie, and at its best, a horribly unsubtle movie that’s also right on the mark.

Before arriving at the Los Angeles villa where most of the film takes place, Beatriz at Dinner opens in a mangrove swamp. Beatriz (Salma Hayek), hidden from view just behind the camera, pilots a boat through the calm, turbid water. Though the film hasn’t yet sprung its politics on us, the phrase “drain the swamp” might echo in your head. Beatriz maneuvers the boat toward a thin passage, bordered by mangrove trees clawing forward at the water. Arteta knows these are complicated times, but if we follow Beatriz’s example — and that of the film — we can find our way to the other side of them and safely to the shore. Or so he wants us to believe.

So far, so spiritual, and one of Beatriz at Dinner’s early shortcomings is how it threatens to tokenize Hayek’s shaman-like medical professional. She’s a health therapist who works at the (fictional) Arendale Cancer Center in Los Angeles, but the myopic white characters call her a healer and a masseuse — one title makes Beatriz sound as though she’s a stereotypical witch doctor, and the other devalues her profession. Any hunk who’s been to massage school can be a masseuse, and masseuses seem to primarily cater to pro golfers and stressed-out businessmen with money to burn on back rubs.

Beatriz says, “I am a health therapist,” when she’s introducing herself to Alex (Jay Duplass) and Shannon (Chloë Sevigny), the first guests to arrive to dinner. So it’s a shock to see so many critics describing Beatriz as “a Mexican healer” (Yahoo! Entertainment), a “masseuse with magic fingers and holistic healing abilities” (RogerEbert.com) and a “masseuse and healer” (the New York Times). You’d have trouble reading a single review that doesn’t describe her as a masseuse, a healer or both. It’s as though all of the critics got together and shared notes.

Calling Beatriz either title denigrates her and what she stands for: the reality of the Latino immigrant. The immigrant’s struggle for equality. The refutation of America’s culture of xenophobia, specifically the “bad hombre” stereotype. The dinner guests call Beatriz a healer and a masseuse because that’s all she is to them. They don’t understand her but pretend to humor her, listening to her talk about healing the Earth until they can pivot the conversation to vagina pics on social media.

It astounds me that so many critics have missed the point entirely. After introducing herself as a professional to Alex and Shannon, the two tokenize her for the remainder of the evening. There’s not much happening in Beatriz at Dinner besides the art of the conversation, so I would have thought critics would pick up on how the dinner guests talk about Beatriz. To call her a masseuse and a healer and nothing more professional and learned would be to use the condescending words of the dinner guests.

The Solid Gold Toilet

Beatriz at Dinner unfolds like an Arthur Miller play. The action is centered entirely within an embarrassingly rich estate in Los Angeles, the grounds lined with palm trees and the veranda overlooking the ocean. Hell, these people have a veranda. Politics or no politics, the owners, Kathy (Connie Britton) and Grant (David Warshofsky), are the kind of people whose wealth is ugly, who seem to have poured money into a Spanish-style home because it brings a little culture to their otherwise cultureless lives — you look at them and think, “Well, I have no idea what they do with their money, but I doubt they have any interest in traditional Spanish architecture.”

They live in a gated community with a guard posted at the entrance. Servants cook, clean and answer the door. They have the lush, square hedges that could only be maintained by a small army of groundskeepers — though we never see the groundskeepers, based on their kitchen staff, they probably mostly speak Spanish.

And the immaculate interiors, shot by Wyatt Garfield and designed by Ashley Fenton and Madelaine Frezza, exude golden candlelight as though it’s the inside of Trump Tower. I was reminded of that solid gold toilet that was at the Guggenheim, the one called “America.”

The people inside the house aren’t much better. Alex, Shannon, Kathy and Grant seem like their biggest concerns are bits of trivial celebrity gossip. On her way in, Shannon complains about how hard it is to walk on the white gravel driveway in heels. You’ve heard of first-world problems; these are one-percenter problems.

The characters are all wealthy, white and contemptible. Even Kathy, who’s by far the most welcoming to Beatriz and possibly the only one at dinner who actually enjoys her company, is comically unaware of her own privilege and ignorance. “Tara’s loving college — so many interesting people,” she tells Beatriz as she’s being massaged. “It’s very diverse. Gays and trans and people from all over.” It’s classic cringe-inducing middle-aged mom conversation, but there’s nothing wrong with that besides having to listen to it. Then, the punchline: “Her roommate is a Jewish girl from New York.” Ah, the height of diversity.

In the film’s beginning, Beatriz drives into the city and distances herself from her Altadena home — where her puppies, goats, garden and shrine indicate the center of her spirituality — and ventures to Kathy and Grant’s palace for a massage appointment. She passes smokestacks rising phallically from concrete bellies, spewing black clouds into the atmosphere. Heatwaves distort the wide shots of her car. She’s barricaded in a middle lane by unmoving walls of traffic.

Her ride to the villa seems ripped straight from Paul Schrader’s nightmares, this warped, sick environment acting as the antithesis of everything Beatriz has at home. When she arrives at the house, we’re treated to a few lovingly framed wide shots as if to say, “Look how much these people paid for this home.”

Environmentalism, xenophobia, tokenism and wealth inequality are hardly novel themes in modern American cinema. They are not problems unique to Trump. But responding to Trump is more than impersonating him on Saturday Night Live. In Beatriz at Dinner, Trump’s counterpart is John Lithgow’s Doug Strutt, an older white real estate mogul notorious for his take-no-prisoners business strategy and openly racist remarks.

Strutt is Grant and Kathy’s very special dinner guest. He surrounds himself with yes-men. They laugh at his jokes. They jeer against the people Strutt steps on, the people who get his way. Beatriz causes him to reevaluate his beliefs and then double-down on them; she’s the rogue element in all this, the outsider who gets to challenge these Trumpish attitudes and politics head-on and try to force change. Yet Beatriz at Dinner could have lost its Trump stand-in altogether and would still be viewed as a reactionary film.

Trump’s a byproduct of the problem, not the problem itself, “collateral damage of the times we’re living in,” Hayek said in a New York Times interview. He’s a prism through which we can understand America, akin to a seining net that dredges up attitudes and ideas from the ocean floor. Just because they’re seeing the light of day now doesn’t mean they weren’t always there.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, he provided names for his base’s racist sympathies, like “welfare queens” and the concept of reverse racism. Trump’s idiolect gave conservatives “bad hombres” and “Miss Housekeeping” and furthered the narrative of Latino immigrants being thugs and rapists coming for our jobs. And that’s only the stuff he said about Latinos.

A Look Behind The Curtain

Strutt arrives right on schedule — light, innocuous comedy music continues on the soundtrack as his black SUV pulls up to the house as if Lithgow’s playing a cartoon cat and not a megalomaniac. And by this point in the film, only 17 minutes in, we’re aching for a character for Beatriz to butt heads with. I want to see Hayek tackle somebody, but alas, Beatriz at Dinner isn’t that kind of movie until it is.

There are only a few differences between Strutt and Trump. The artificiality of the hair — Lithgow’s got a proud, balding dome. The ability to string words together coherently — it is a movie, after all, and it’s best if the audience understands what you’re saying. And the authorship of a “memoir” — Strutt seems intent to pen his solo, while Trump: The Art of the Deal was nearly entirely ghostwriter Tony Schwartz’s creation.

The film’s structured as a peek behind the curtain, a fantasy about how Trump behaves with his wealthy white friends when there aren’t rallies to run, political leaders to meet with or minority populations to terrorize. Beatriz is the great disruptor of this otherwise peaceful evening.

She wears grey khakis and a button-down top, not having planned for her car to stall and trap her at le palais de blancheur. Strutt, of course, assumes she’s part of the help — the first thing he says to her is “Can I get another bourbon, hon?” (He’s always calling women “hon” or “honey.” Thank goodness we aren’t introduced to him in the back of a tour bus; there’s no telling what he’d say.)

In one of the best unspoken moments of the film, Beatriz takes a break from socializing and stares out at the ocean, where just past the shore, an enormous black blight muddies the waters — residue from an oil spill. We push in on the spill, then we push in on Beatriz’s face. Then we cut to Strutt, drinking with Grant and Alex. The cut’s not perfect, and it would have made Kuleshov tear his hair out — we should have cut directly from the oil spill to Strutt since that’s the association we’re meant to make.

The man’s an environmental nightmare. He boasts about his hotel projects and all the land he needs to be cleared to make them possible, and as for casualties? “No one’s getting kicked out of their homes, except maybe a few birds.” Though the birds happen to be endangered species, they’re in Strutt’s way.

The birds aren’t the worst he’s had it. “Once we built a hotel in Panama, and some locals blew up one of our trucks with a f*cking bomb,” he laughs. The actions are what he focuses on, not their motivations. As far as Strutt’s concerned, Panama belongs to him, not to the locals. And just when you remember the words “manifest destiny” from your grade-school American history classes, Strutt says it for you: “I think we all have a destiny to manifest.”

At dinner, Lithgow dominates the frame as well as the conversation, making a number of uncomfortable asides that unfortunately pale in comparison to the man he’s representing. “You are a knockout, and if I wasn’t on my third wife, I’d steal you away,” he tells Kathy. But we see it as a harmless joke. Writer Mike White, a frequent collaborator of Arteta’s, doesn’t push the dialogue far enough.

But most of the details of the conversation are just right. Characters interrupt Beatriz, probe her for her country of origin and ask if she came to the United States legally. Kathy even orders Beatriz dinner for her after everyone else at the table spoke for themselves as if someone who doesn’t come from wealth can’t possibly possess the faculties to ask for food on their own. It’s a masterclass in writing microaggressions.

The Rhino And The Goats

The goats at Beatriz’s house need to live in her bedroom. “The neighbor, he’s crazy,” Beatriz tells Kathy post-massage. “He’s always drinking and angry. He came to my house at 11 at night, and he said that they were gonna come and take away my goats. … The city, you know. Because they think they’re nuisance animals.” Beatriz found one of her goats dead in the garden, its neck broken. She knows the neighbor’s responsible, she tells Kathy. So now the goats live in the bedroom.

Nothing’s been done about the neighbor, both because Beatriz can’t prove it was him and because her neighborhood isn’t exactly zoned for goats. Perhaps she feels, too that in Altadena, the police are less likely to help a Latina woman.

The goats are a pretty blatant metaphor for Latinos, the comment about their being a nuisance perpetuating Trump’s rhetoric about Mexican immigrants bringing drugs and crime into the country. But the violence against them, usually spawning from white rage against outsiders intruding on American values and in American spaces, is linked here directly with Beatriz’s environmentalism and spirituality. “I could feel his pain,” she says. “He was already dead. I could still feel his pain.” The violent act is a physical trespass as well as a spiritual one.

The link between Strutt and the goat-killing neighbor comes when Strutt’s boasting about killing a rhinoceros. The guests pass around a photo of Strutt posing giddily, rifle in hand, with the bloodied, dead animal by his side. There’s a seminal screenwriting book called Save the Cat wherein Blake Snyder argues that every protagonist needs a textbook-heroic “save the cat” moment to win over the audience’s sympathies. I guess shooting and killing an endangered rhino is the inverse of that. It’s how we know Strutt’s bad news.

He represents man’s usurping of the natural world, a corrupting force fanning out and killing everything in its path, not unlike the oil spill Beatriz sees from the veranda. We push in on Beatriz’s face, and though we know what point the film is trying to make, we cut to the dead goat in the garden — I suppose it’s for the people in the back row. Strutt is the same as her neighbor: taking advantage of the natural world. Destroying instead of healing. Getting away with it because of privilege. A destiny to manifest.

Beatriz throws Strutt’s phone across the room in anger and swears at him. Naturally, she profusely apologizes to Kathy later. She shouldn’t drink like that, Beatriz tells her. The next scene begins with Beatriz lugging the rest of a bottle of white wine upstairs.

She’s a little mischievous now as Strutt whittles down her morals. The guests call her a saint and a miracle worker, and this little rebellion is the first time she does anything to push against those labels.

We see darker, more cynical thoughts occupy Beatriz’s mind as she looks out her window at Strutt, Grant and Alex smoking cigars and drinking beside the pool. How do these people deserve to so blithely smoke cigars, to so wantonly slurp good whiskey? How has Strutt gotten the kind of self-satisfaction and brazen comfort that Beatriz wishes she had? And surely Grant’s pool was not bought with honest money.

We can see Beatriz’s mind running in wine-warped circles, and Hayek beautifully sells the distress of someone who spent her whole life healing and suddenly comes up against the plague. She’s trying to stop awful things from transpiring in the world, yet more and more evil happens each day because of men like Strutt.

So she goes outside to join the others, and she brings a guitar to sing a song, as she promised Kathy she would earlier in the evening. “We always wanna go back to the places where we loved life, but the old, simple things are now gone,” she says by way of introducing the song. It’s a direct attack on Strutt, and her lingering stare at him seems to say, “And it’s all your fault.”

To these silly people hiding behind their money, Beatriz’s spirituality and Spanish music are like enjoying a walk around Epcot. You can get carnitas and a margarita at La Hacienda de San Angel and soak up “Mexican culture,” but what you’re really doing is bumping up against the walls of your own ignorance.

These people have no clue what Mexican culture is. All they have are a series of assumptions based on Beatriz’s character. They assume Mexican culture at its purest is spiritual, calm, welcoming, soothing. It’s a convenient assessment because to these real estate people intent on using Mexican land for hotel construction, that also translates to “complacent.”

So they sit and quietly listen to Beatriz sing in a language foreign to them, unable to connect to her words but trying to grasp the emotion in her voice. They keep her culture at arm’s length because they don’t really need to interact directly with it.

Privilege means never having to care. Never having to do anything about the misfortunes of others. Perhaps that’s what Trump thought about the Families Belong Together March in Washington, D.C. Or the Indigenous Peoples March. Or the Women’s March. Privilege means you can tune people out, especially when they’re suffering and you’ve got 17 golf courses.

So Beatriz plays her song, and the guests all politely thank her when she finishes.

“All Tears Flow From The Same Source”

In its second half, Arteta and White deconstruct the purity of Beatriz’s image. She drinks too much, indirectly threatens to kill Strutt — she muses that fate brought them together for “revenge” — and finally, Beatriz snaps. One of the first big laughs the film got from me was when she’s in the middle of calling Strutt a cancer upon the Earth and Kathy tries to defuse the situation. “Shut up, Kathy,” Beatriz says, not even looking at her.

All this works to soothe over the Mother Theresa image the first half built for Beatriz. As Trump-reactionary cinema with a probably liberal-minded audience, the film has to offer something more than passivity as the solution for our troubled times. “If you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is a fine message for children, but it has very little traction when dealing with men trying to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Beatriz waits outside for a tow truck, and Strutt enters the foyer talking on the phone. The truck arrives, but Beatriz is watching Strutt. In the film’s most entertaining scene, she reenters the house, grabs a letter opener and stabs Strutt in the neck. As he lay dying, blood pooling out, she says to him, “All tears flow from the same source,” as though that’s Beatriz’s “Let off some steam, Bennett” five-dollar one-liner.

Beatriz at Dinner deftly navigates this aspect of resistance in the Trump era — the scene is, of course, a fantasy. She doesn’t kill him, but it goes to show that sometimes even Mother Theresa wants to throw hands and murder a dude.

This is when Beatriz at Dinner gets annoying. If a movie is going to focus its energies on taking down society — either here, by way of a dialogue-heavy chamber play, or in something as literally anarchic and destructive as Fight Club — then it should have a solution. What system would benefit us more than the one currently in place?

The question facing Arteta and White at the conclusion of Beatriz at Dinner is one that goes unanswered: How do we resist? What does resistance look like in the age of Trump, and how should we do it? If resistance doesn’t look like violent retribution, are we supposed to revert to nonviolence, peaceful protest and the policies people like Martin Luther King, Jr. championed in the 1950s and ’60s?

Beatriz at Dinner instead doubles down on its protagonist’s spirituality. In the film’s final 10 minutes, the portentous music and long, silent shots indicate that we’re supposed to revere Beatriz for taking the path of nonviolence. She makes the tow truck pull over at the side of the road, and she wades into the ocean not to die, but to reunite with the Earth. Her soul is taken back to the mangrove swamp, this time facing open water and a dazzling sunset.

The implication is that Beatriz escaped the mangrove maze, finding peaceful, open water and replenishing her soul, all because she told off Kathy, voiced her opinions to Strutt and then chose not to violently murder him. Call me cynical, but that seems like a non-solution.

The House Of No Solutions

The most notable Trump-reactionary films have been period pieces. BlacKkKlansman, The Post and even Vice all use history as a lens through which to see our present political moment more clearly, but the problem there is that we already know history is doomed to repeat itself.

The Post doesn’t represent the last time the free press struggles to print truth against people in power. BlacKkKlansman ominously ends with the Charlottesville rally. The racism that’s bubbling to the surface now is the same aggression that Ron Stallworth fought against in 1970s Colorado. And Vice doesn’t mark the last time we’ll have a despicable vice president or someone in power who exploits their privilege.

As period pieces, these films have to reconcile the “then” with the “now.” But by recognizing that the problems of the past haven’t died, haven’t merely gone away, how can we glean any sort of message from them? Ron’s actions in BlacKkKlansman didn’t lead to the end of white nationalism, so is there anything we can learn from them?

Similarly, if Beatriz doesn’t snuff out the heart of the Earth’s suffering — if she doesn’t shiv Strutt with a letter opener and let him bleed out on the floor — how is this a victory? We have no indication that her words touched Strutt at all, that she changed his perspective. Everybody at the dinner was 15 drinks in by the time Beatriz started to act out, so it’d be a miracle if any of them even remembered what she said come morning. She might as well not have been at the dinner at all.

Movies that respond to Trump don’t stick the landing because they don’t have solutions. Highlighting a problem is easy, and there are plenty of documentaries that go into great detail about the inadequacies of the Trump presidency. The King,  Fahrenheit 11/9, Seeing Allred, American Dharma and The Brink are all comprehensive analyses of the horrors of the Trump regime and its implications.

But offering solutions is hard, especially because we’ve evolved a viewpoint wherein the movies are supposed to be escapist. Even the glimpses of Charlottesville in BlacKkKlansman don’t take up too much of the buddy-cop plot at the film’s core. It can still be a fun movie with plenty of laughs and thrilling, suspenseful moments, but that comes at the price of having anything to say.

Beatriz at Dinner isn’t particularly funny for something that’s supposed to be a comedy. It isn’t particularly dramatic for something that’s supposed to be a drama. Instead, the film drops all pretenses of genre and entertainment to try to get to the heart of the problem. Arteta and White seem to think that by putting us within close enough emotional and physical proximity to Strutt, we’ll understand Trump, too.

Conclusion: Where To Go Now

Beatriz at Dinner is really good at painting a tableau of where we’re at. It’s a photograph of our national moment, 81 minutes of summary and analysis. There are no solutions in Beatriz at Dinner, but I’m grateful we got a movie responding to Trump in the first place.

Suicide Squad, Batman v. Superman and Justice League seem to be stuck in the problems of the Bush administration with vague desert settings, 9/11 imagery and world-ending doomsday technology. Plenty of other big-budget spectacles, from Rogue One to the Transformers films, are still obsessed with Iraq War imagery, Middle-Eastern combat zones and the brave men and women who fight insurgents in the name of freedom. They’re also, coincidentally, obsessed with WMDs.

Sometimes it feels as though Hollywood is out of touch, lagging 20 years behind the present day. So it’s a blessing when any movie, including Beatriz at Dinner, taps into our modern political climate at all, solutions or no solutions. It’s irrefutable that Beatriz at Dinner is one of the earliest Trump-reactionary films — one that was written, cast and produced while he was on the campaign trail and serving in office. Rarely do films feel this current, and surely the coming years will bring bigger-budgeted, more ambitious projects that reflect our nation in the age of Trump.

What film do you think best encapsulates the Trump presidency? Comment below with your pick!