Donald Trump isn’t the first appalling billionaire, and he certainly won’t be the last. But what would you do if you found yourself at a dinner party honoring a man who has an awful lot in common with the hotel mogul (and some other title I can’t think of right now)? In Beatriz at Dinner, Mike White and Miguel Arteta’s latest collaboration, Beatriz (Selma Hayek) finds herself in this very position. She elects to not keep her worldview under wraps when faced with a man who is the very antithesis of all she holds dear.
Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, Selma Hayek de-glams herself for the two Mikes in order to embody the character of a simple, earthy, Mexican immigrant who wants nothing more than to do her part to heal the world. She wakes up fresh-faced, empathetic eyes peering out from beneath woefully cropped bangs. She pulls on mom jeans and starts her day caring for the bevy of animals, including a goat, that she keeps as roommates. After a quick meditation session in front of an alter dedicated to family and a different goat, she loads her massage table into her relic of a Volkswagen, and heads off to a holistic cancer center where she pulls out all the naturopathic stops for struggling patients. This is the routine of a person who wants to help others, possibly at the expense of her own self-care…
Read the rest at Hammer to Nail!
This film was part of the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival.
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