Beatriz at Dinner - 3 smiles

Before "Beatriz at Dinner" gets down to its serious topics, it starts as a seemingly innocent comedy of manners. Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Los Angeles-based Mexican immigrant whose spiritual affinity and natural empathy has led to a career as a header, a profession that allows her to combine traditional massage therapy with a holistic approach to maintaining health. After she is called to a Newport Beach mansion for a massage for Kathy (Connie Britton), a liberal whose daughter Beatriz helped through a bout of cancer, Beatriz's old VW fails to start and she is invited to stay for dinner while she waits for a friend to come to fix the car. As it turns out, the dinner is a celebration of the closing of an environmentally damaging real estate development deal and the guest of honor is John Lithgow's Doug Strutt, a well-known billionaire. When Strutt meets Beatriz, he mistakes her for the help and orders a drink, confirming for her that she has just encountered evil. Her fears are confirmed when, halfway through dinner, Strutt shares a cell phone snapshot of a dead rhinoceros, a big game quarry killed on an African safari. That's when the humor script writer Mike White has sprinkled throughout and the tension director Miguel Arteta has been building explodes. Nonetheless, all of everyone's hard work is in jeopardy of becoming undone by an ending that strikes out not once, but twice.

Both Beatriz and Strutt would be caricatures in the hands of less skilled actors, but Hayek and Lithgow give masterful performances. Hayek carries the pain of her patients (and the recent loss of one of her pet goats) in her wounded eyes. She approaches the strange world of capitalistic greed with curiosity, heartbreak and finally anger. Lithgow portrays Strutt in a logical way; he is a man who sees hunting as a primal experience, using patience and perseverance as a way to bring order to chaos. Strutt is in charge of all things and he knows it and likes it. Then there's the ending. An overwhelmed Beatriz makes choices (twice) that fundamentally betray the character Hayek has so thoughtfully constructed. And when the director must explain the ending, it's an ending that's not effective at all. Beatriz deserves better.