Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a self-described healer. She works in southern California performing massage therapy, hands-on healing, and all manners of alternative medicine. She lives at home with a couple dogs and a pet goat, fenced into her bedroom after an angry neighbor killed her other goat just last week. While Beatriz offers her services to make others feel better, we find her in a particularly saddened state.
One of her clients is a wealthy family in a gated in community. Kathy and Grant (Connie Britton & David Warshofsky) have known Beatriz for years after she helped nurse their daughter during a bout of cancer. She now comes periodically to offer massages and to chat. After her car breaks down on the way back home, Beatriz is stuck in a predicament: Kathy and Grant are throwing a dinner party for a group of elite friends who are working to close a real estate deal. Beatriz, at first confused as house staff, is offered white wine and casually joins in with the conversation. The contrast in lifestyles is shocking.
The movie might be considered a standard drama, but there is a lot of awkward humor that comes from the humble Beatriz sitting opposite a corrupt CEO (John Lithgow) with brandy and cigar in hand. Salma Hayek is brilliant in the role, stripped down and appearing aged through a life of hard work. She explains how her family emigrated at a young age, how she has worked many odd jobs to scrape by. We believe her. Likewise with Lithgow, the presumed antagonist here. He jokes about hunting wild game and committing white-collar crimes with a twinkle in his eye. While the conversations almost always steer directly into awkward town, the performances are never anything but stellar.
Some might describe this movie as a biting satire; a commentary on our country's sticky relationship with Mexicans and legal immigrants. Lithgow's character is even a real estate mogul with successful sons and a new marriage to his third wife. The comparisons and heavy-handed dialogue build to a point that the movie eventually resorts to a metaphorical hammer, hitting the audience over the head repeatedly in order to drive home the point. All I wanted to shout out was "we get it!" Even the end, a colossal misfire of a dream sequence, seeks to inspire sympathy of a woman like Beatriz. All I felt was an impending eye roll and disappointment that such a wonderful film could go sour so fast.
I would still tell you to see this movie. Watch it for the wonderful performances (even though the characters eventually become black and white caricatures of politicians we see in the news every day). Stay for the sometimes good dialogue and natural scenes in which 6 wealthy white people (and Beatriz) carry on casual conversations and find that there is simply no topics that they can all agree on. After a night of heavy drinking and fighting, Kathy admits to Beatriz that "I don't think I know you," to which Beatriz naturally responds with "you never have." There's a surface level of politeness in our country today, but when you dig just a little deeper under the surface, we realize how absolutely polarized its citizens are. Why did this movie have to betray such a wonderfully innocent observation?
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