BEATRIZ AT DINNER

Directer Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White follow their collaboration on THE GOOD GIRL with this hamfisted painfully earnest take on the class divide in contemporary America.  Salma Hayek plays Beatriz, a massage therapist and earnest do-gooder who treats both suffering cancer patients and rich capitalist bastards.  As the film opens, there's a chance it might be a comedy.  Beatriz is quirky!  She keeps goats in her house and has a habit of saying socially inappropriate things and invading people's space.  But that isn't what this film is.  When Beatriz' car breaks down at a client's (Connie Britton - NASHVILLE) house in Newport Beach, that client invites her to stay for dinner - a small celebration of future profits on a real estate development.  The rich guests (Chloe Sevigny, Jay Duplass) proceed to ignore Beatriz, then assume she's the help, then ignore her disquiet at their development.  But when the richest and most evil of the men (John Lithgow) reveals he also hunts rhinos, Beatriz really loses it.

The problem I have with this film is that it isn't a biting political satire or a nuanced portrait of class or race relations. Rather it's a pantomime filled with caricatures.  The bad guys here are truly bad.  The airhead dippy wives are just that.  And Beatriz is ultimately a Christlike martyr of zero flaws and faults. This makes for dull, dumb, simplistic storytelling.  The audience deserves far more.

AT DINNER has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance 2017 and opens in the USA on June 9th.

Miguel Arteta retrospective - THE GOOD GIRL

The only good thing to have come out of my watching YOUTH IN REVOLT is that it prompted me to look back at the career of director Miguel Arteta. It turns out the last feature he directed was way back in 2002 - the bleak tragicomedy THE GOOD GIRL. I really enjoyed THE GOOD GIRL, not least because I was pleasantly surprised that Jennifer Aniston would have the balls to play such an equivocal and drab character. I was even more surprised at how convincing she was in the role. The film garnered a lot of critical praise, and I guess its surprising that Arteta took so long to get back into features. It's slightly less surprising that Jennifer Aniston has drifted back toward the light and cheery comedy fare that made her name.

Anyways, back to the matter under consideration. THE GOOD GIRL is the story of a supermarket check-out girl called Justine (Aniston) who is married to a good-hearted but dull pot-head (John C Reilly). For no better reason than boredom, she starts an affair with a slightly creepily obsessive college drop-out with Catcher in the Rye delusions (Jake Gyllenhaal). Things get even more complicated when her husband's even more creepy best mate (Tim Blake Nelson) attempts to blackmail her with this knowledge.

What I really love about this film is that while the situation may be contrived, and some of the characters exaggerated (particularly Zooey Deschanel's brilliantly subversive store assistant), the emotional conflicts ring true. Because, at its core, this is a film about a typical housewife who finds herself settling for less than she had hoped for, and needs to decide where the balance lies between selfishly pursuing her happiness and disappointing those that she does, on some residual level, love. And it's about a woman wondering whether settling is really as bad as she thought itm might have been. The great thing is that Justine isn't just a plain vanilla good girl. She is fundamentally decent but does not some really questionable shit and makes some terrible decisions. It's rare to see such a realistic and nuanced character study outside of European art cinema.

If you haven't seen THE GOOD GIRL, don't be put off by YOUTH IN REVOLT. This is a great little black comedy that's well-acted, intelligent and interesting to watch.

THE GOOD GIRL was released in 2002 and is available on DVD.

YEAR OF THE DOG - neither romantic nor funny

Peggy (Molly Shannon) is a lonely middle-aged woman. Her sister-in-law (Laura Dern) is smug and self-centred; her boss is materialistic and selfish; her best-friend (Regina King) is callous and deluded. So Peggy finds solace in her relationship with her dog, Pencil. When he dies she transfers her attention to a similarly psychologically stunted dog-trainer called Newt (Peter Sarsgaard). Rejected once again, Peggy has what can only be described as a nervous breakdown.

This is not the stuff of romance nor comedy, and I was astounded at just what a relentlessly depressing film this was. From the trailer, one might have thought this would be another indie rom-com about quirky characters finding love, EAGLE VERSUS SHARK stylee. Instead, this is simply a long-drawn out tragedy in which a potentially normal woman throws away her life. To that extent, it reminded me of Mike White's previous script, THE GOOD GIRL, which left me similarly ambivalent about the central character and similarly depressed, despite the odd witty one-liner. Definitely one to avoid.

YEAR OF THE DOG played Sundance 2007 and was released in the US in April. It is currently on release in the UK.