Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Tags

Connie Britton, Dinner party, Drama, Healer, John Lithgow, Miguel Arteta, Mike White, Review, Salma Hayek

D: Miguel Arteta / 82m

Cast: Salma Hayek, John Lithgow, Connie Britton, Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker, Chloë Sevigny, David Warshofsky, John Early

The dinner party has long been used as an excuse for movies to explore the differences between people, or to expose secrets, or to raise questions of a social, sexual, psychological, philosophical, or moral nature. Beatriz at Dinner seeks to cover each of these angles in its relatively short running time, but is it as successful as it may have wanted to be? The answer lies in the way in which it establishes its main character, the titular Beatriz (Hayek). When we first meet her, Beatriz is in a rowboat in a mangrove swamp. It’s a beautiful location, peaceful and calming, and on a bright sunny day. It’s idyllic. But then Beatriz spies a white goat stranded on the shore line. The camera moves in closer – and then Beatriz wakes up; it’s all been a dream. However, it’s a dream that has a basis in reality, because Beatriz has a goat in a pen in her bedroom. It tells us a lot about her, about her principles, and what type of person she is. How will she fare then, when placed in a room with a group of people whose experiences of life, and whose attitudes, are so different from hers?

That’s the question at the heart of Mike White’s screenplay, one of four that were made into movies during 2017 – the others were The Emoji Movie, Brad’s Status, and Pitch Perfect 3. White is a multi-hyphenate who has built up a solid reputation for himself as a screenwriter, and since his first script for Dead Man on Campus (1998), he’s plied his trade in both mainstream and indie circles. Beatriz at Dinner is definitely one of his indie projects, and it reunites him with Arteta, who directed another of White’s scripts, Chuck & Buck (2000). But where White is usually sharper and more astute with his indie scripts, this time around there’s a sense that not all the movie’s ambitions have been met. It’s puzzling, yet perhaps shouldn’t be, because it all hinges on Beatriz, and Beatriz isn’t exactly the kind of heroine that we were probably expecting. She’s a legal migrant from Mexico, she works as a therapist at a cancer treatment centre, and she does private massages for a variety of clients. She doesn’t wear any make-up, drives an old beat up car, has a goat and two dogs, doesn’t appear to be in a relationship, and believes in an holistic approach to life.

One of her clients is Kathy (Britton). Kathy lives with her husband, Grant (Warshofsky), in a gated community outside of Los Angeles. Their house has a view of the ocean and practically yells new money. Beatriz arrives one afternoon to give Kathy a massage, but her car won’t start when she tries to leave. Kathy insists that Beatriz stay for dinner, even though it’s a dinner party for two of Grant’s business colleagues and their wives, and Beatriz is only waiting on a friend to come and get her car started. The first guests, Alex (Duplass) and Shannon (Sevigny) arrive, followed by the other couple, Doug (Lithgow) and Jeana (Landecker). The three couples are celebrating a business deal that Alex has closed, and which stands to make them even richer than they already are. Beatriz begins to suspect that she knows Doug from some time in her past, perhaps in Mexico. As the evening progresses, Beatriz has a little too much to drink, but not enough to stop her voicing her disgust when Doug brags about his having hunted big game in Africa. But her outburst causes a rift between her and Kathy, and when she learns more about Doug and challenges him on some of his sharp practices as a businessman, that rift grows even wider…

Beatriz at Dinner has been widely regarded as a comedy as well as a drama. This is a little misleading, as while there are certainly humorous moments, and other moments where a darkly satirical tone is adopted, this is a drama through and through, serious in its intentions, and direct in its approach to the material. White is looking to skewer the pompous, affected nature of these entitled men and their equally entitled wives, and he does so by providing them with dialogue that makes them sound crass, insensitive, patronising, and lacking in self-awareness. It even extends to the “help”, when John Early’s eerily proficient Evan interrupts Beatriz when she’s talking, to advise on the starters that are available. Beatriz is talking about the hardships she’s experienced in her life; he wants to make sure the guests know what sauces go with the beef and the halibut. Just by that alone you know the evening isn’t going to go well.

Tension arises through the character of Doug, whose company has been involved in several controversial incidents, some of which have occurred in Mexico. The scene is set for a showdown between Beatriz and Doug, but White makes Doug look like he’s made out of Teflon; no matter how angry or aggrieved Beatriz becomes, Doug just shrugs it off as if it’s of so little importance than he can’t even be bothered to acknowledge it. By adopting this approach to the character, White has made him incapable of being affected, and so he remains a largely anodyne villain, in place to stir up emotions and provide conflict, but too remote in attitude to care about being attacked in the first place. Lithgow is good as Doug, expressing right-wing opinions on a variety of topics, and forever wondering why anyone should care if what he does is harmful or even immoral. Doug is a character we want to see bested and taught a valuable lesson about responsibility, but White has other ideas, and so in those terms the movie ends unsatisfactorily, and worse still, elliptically.

Aside from Beatriz, Doug and Kathy, the characters are bland, interchangeable versions of each other, though Grant does show a huge propensity for ass-kissing (see how many times he agrees with something Doug says). As a result there’s little in the way of scene-stealing, and Sevigny and Duplass are on the periphery of the action for the most part, their roles more mundane than necessary. Britton is good as the outwardly empathetic but inwardly image conscious Kathy, while Hayek connects well with Beatriz’s sense of herself as a healer, expressing the character’s spiritual and environmental passions with an understated yet still fervent sincerity. Arteta has trouble mustering enough energy in some scenes, leaving the movie feeling flat and prosaic, and there are times when it seems as if something momentous is about to occur – but it doesn’t (though when something momentous actually does occur, even then it’s undermined by narrative decision making). All this makes for occasionally intriguing viewing, but in the end, the movie leaves too much unaddressed to make it work consistently or completely.

Rating: 6/10 – a movie that often lacks substance thanks to the stereotypical nature of most of its characters, Beatriz at Dinner is neither acerbic enough nor penetrating enough in its efforts to expose the moral and ethical lassitude of America’s nouveau riche; Hayek gives an impassioned portrayal, but it isn’t matched elsewhere, and though the script strives for political relevance, it doesn’t offer the kind of insights that would have an audience nodding their heads in weary recognition.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)

29 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Action, Amsterdam, Belarus, Comedy, Drama, Gary Oldman, Patrick Hughes, Review, Ryan Reynolds, Salma Hayek, Samuel L. Jackson, The Hague, Thriller

D: Patrick Hughes / 118m

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Elodie Yung, Joachim de Almeida, Tine Joustra, Sam Hazeldine, Richard E. Grant

There are several moments during The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Hollywood’s latest attempt at the mismatched buddy genre of action thrillers, when the movie’s humour seems to come on a little too strong, as if it’s fighting its way into the script and looking to be front and centre. More often than not it’s a moment of physical comedy, such as the extended scene where Ryan Reynolds’ triple-A rated protection agent, Michael Bryce, is sitting at an outdoor Amsterdam café complaining about the behaviour of Samuel L. Jackson’s veteran assassin, Darius Kincaid. While he vents, chaos erupts all around him, as everyone in the vicinity ducks for cover, and bullets fly indiscriminately. The barman cowers, Bryce keeps on complaining, and eventually a car plows through the tables behind him. On the surface, it’s a funny scene, with Reynolds’ deadpan expression the counterpoint for all the mayhem going on behind him. But watch it a second time and the humour isn’t there anymore. Now it’s a technically clever scene that relies entirely on Reynolds’ performance. Watch it a third time, and it’s a scene to be endured. Should a scene like that provoke such a response so quickly? If it’s really that funny, then the answer is No.

For much of the rest of the movie, the script’s attempts at levity only serve to highlight just how uneven the material truly is. The humour is largely forced, the action is perfunctory (a chase along the canals in Amsterdam should see Kincaid’s commandeered boat reduced to splinters, or the involvement of at least one Dutch police car), and the basic plot is ludicrous before it’s even begun: Gary Oldman’s brutal Belarussian dictator, Dukhovich, on trial at the Hague for being a brutal Belarussian dictator, can only be brought to justice by the testimony of Jackson’s veteran assassin. Cue a race against time from Manchester, England to said trial, with the usual hundreds of disposable bad guys trying to stop Bryce and Kincaid from getting there. Along the way, Bryce’s back story takes up more and more time but never becomes interesting enough to warrant it (he’s still sulking over the death of a client under his protection, though technically the circumstances mean It doesn’t count), while Kincaid is ratting on Dukhovich as a way of getting his wife, Sonia (Hayek), out of jail (yes, folks, he’s doing it for love, the old softie).

It all plays out predictably enough, with supporting characters straight out of Stock City, including Yung’s Interpol agent, Amelia Roussel, who just happens to be Bryce’s ex-girlfriend, and de Almeida’s shifty Interpol boss who may well be in cahoots with Dukhovich (what are the odds?). No matter how much Tom O’Connor’s script tries to instil proceedings with freshness and vitality, the banal nature of the material as a whole brings those attempts crashing down like Redwoods. In the director’s chair, Hughes, who made more out of The Expendables 3 (2014) than was required, has no option but to go with the flow and let his stars do the heavy lifting. As long as he can get them from A to B, Hughes’s work is done, and often before the end of a scene. Others, but particularly those that feature Hayek’s apoplectic performance as Sonia, don’t appear to have had Hughes’ involvement at all. (Sonia looks and sounds like a character brought in from another movie altogether.) By the time we reach the end and justice is done, it’s become possibly the most generic action movie of the year.

But what of the chemistry between Reynolds and Jackson? Surely that’s in the movie’s favour? Well, strangely enough, the pair work better when they’re apart. Reynolds’ lovelorn, soppy-headed protection agent is like a man-child dropped into a war zone, while Jackson – well, Jackson trots out the same hard-headed “motherfucker”-spouting character he’s been portraying ever since the word was invented. Cue angry stare, mad-as-hell stare, glary stare, and angry mad-as-hell glary stare, all of them trotted out at regular points in the movie, and almost as if they qualify as their own action beats. Jackson is seriously wasted here, and not in a good, been-to-Amsterdam-for-some-of-them-chocolate-brownies kind of way either. When they’re together, Reynolds and Jackson spar like an old married couple, an old tired married couple who can no longer stand each other. Oldman grabs his pay cheque with both hands and hams it up accordingly, while the rest of the cast do their best to get through all the absurdity and nonsense with their dignity intact.

All of this indolence and protracted inertia – Bryce and Kincaid have twenty-four hours to get to the Hague but it feels like they’re taking twice as long – allied to the kind of comedy that comes pre-marked as “strained” is all the more dispiriting when you realise that O’Connor’s script was another Black List screenplay, this time from 2011. But back then it didn’t have any comedy. Instead it was a straight drama. But a few weeks before filming began, a two-week rewrite meant less drama and more comedy. And now we have the end result: a poorly assembled collection of scenes that hint constantly at what might have been. Maybe one day the movie will be remade with its original format, but until then this is all we have. It’s just that overall, it’s not enough.

Rating: 4/10 – an idea that probably looked great on paper – Reynolds! Jackson! Comedy! Action! – The Hitman’s Bodyguard translates into something that never takes full advantage of its basic premise, and chugs along quite amiably without ever doing anything to reward the viewer for their patience; with a cast that should have known better, it’s a movie that quickly fades from the memory soon after it’s watched – so it gets something right at least.

Everly (2014)

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Apartment, Drama, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Joe Lynch, Laura Cepeda, Mother/daughter relationship, Review, Salma Hayek, The Sadist, Thriller

D: Joe Lynch / 92m

Cast: Salma Hayek, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Laura Cepeda, Togo Igawa, Akie Kotabe, Gabriella Wright, Caroline Chikezie, Jennifer Blanc, Jelena Gavrilovic, Aisha Ayamah

Everly (Hayek) has been held captive for four years in an apartment building by notorious gangster Taiko (Watanabe). She hasn’t seen her five year old daughter, Maisey (Ayamah), or mother Edith (Cepeda), in all that time. Having made the decision to help the police by informing on Taiko, her plan to get out from his clutches begins to backfire when he finds out what’s she’s done. He leaves her to several of his gang, who abuse her, but she has a gun hidden in her apartment and she uses it to kill them. With her police contact having been disposed of by Taiko, he calls to tell her that she won’t be getting out of the apartment alive. He puts a bounty on her head, and soon, the prostitutes working on the same floor are all trying to kill her.

Everly deals with all of them except for Anna (Wright), with whom she strikes a bargain: let her have two hours to make sure her mother and daughter are out of the city, and she’ll let Anna kill her and collect the bounty. Unable to get a sizeable amount of money to them, she thinks of a way in which they can come to her. Before that can happen she has to fight off various would-be assassins, and deal with one of Taiko’s gang she calls Dead Man (Kotabe), who is bleeding to death on her couch. He helps her to avoid being killed and when Edith and Maisey arrive he watches over Maisey while Everly explains the situation to her mother. But the arrival of The Sadist (Igawa) and his group of Kabuki-masked sidekicks puts Everly and her mother in mortal jeopardy, as Everly finds herself caged and forced to watch as her mother is threatened with various forms of acid.

Beginning with a dark screen and a soundtrack filled with a woman’s cries of pain and then followed by an overhead shot of a heavily-tattooed, and naked, woman stumbling into a bathroom, Everly announces itself as a less-than-subtle action movie from the get-go. And so it proves, with ever more ridiculous bouts of frenzied action, ever more inane dialogue (which culminates in Taiko arriving and displaying his knowledge of the Psycho’s Book of Villainous Monologues), ever more uncomfortable moments involving the five year old Amayah, and the narrative skipping merrily from one absurd scene to the next in its quest to be as over-the-top as possible.

And therein lies the main problem with Yale Hannon’s overcooked screenplay: it tries too hard to be hip, funny and profane. Its hyper-stylised violence aside, the movie is a cornucopia of awkward humour – Maisey wanting to open a Xmas present that has a policeman’s head inside – and misjudged sentiment: Everly being able to convince Anna not to kill her straight away. (As plot devices go, this one is about as credible as Everly being shot in the side and it leaving huge entrance and exit wounds, wounds she then shrugs off for the rest of the movie.) Add in The Sadist’s cruel, icy menace, and Taiko’s barely suppressed rage, and you have a script that borders on misogyny at the same time as it propagates the idea of the strong, determined woman who’ll defend her family at all costs (as long as she’s wearing a tight-fitting, bust-enhancing bra and top).

Hayek is lumbered with a role that allows her to show Everly as brave, vulnerable, resourceful, sensitive, determined, and sometimes scared and fearless in the same scene (there are times when the actress looks as bewildered by what’s happening as the viewer probably is). But this is a movie where the main character is the movie, and without Hayek throwing herself into it – literally – a lot of what passes for serious dramatics would fall flat on its face in seconds (that original choice Kate Hudson would have been as good is hard to imagine). Hayek is rueful, proud and undeniably sexy (even when spattered with blood), and she dominates the movie, her sharp-angled features as expressive as ever, and her sheer physicality in the role proving a decided bonus.

Of the supporting cast, Kotabe as the kind-hearted yakuza “Dead Man”, and Cepeda as Everly’s worried, and harried, mother make the most impact, while Watanabe tries to be cold-hearted and threatening but succeeds in making Taiko peevish and grouchy instead, and considering the relative ease with which she’s offed around two dozen or so people, unable to realise just how deadly Everly can be (frighteningly so, in fact, showing an aptitude for handling and using guns that is never even close to being explained properly). With the main villain given such a build-up, to have him “monologue” and give Everly too many chances to kill him, it’s a wonder he’s made it as far as he has.

On the technical side, Steve Galner’s cinematography adds a pleasing amount of gloom to proceedings, and the movie never once looks as garish as you might expect. The action scenes are ably assembled by editor Evan Schiff and have a visceral intensity about them that keeps the movie ticking over from one outlandish stunt to the next, and Ondrej Nekvasil’s production design helps play down the fact that the apartment varies in size from scene to scene. Overseeing all this, Lynch displays a fondness for odd camera angles that don’t always enhance the image, but he does score highly in the way he stages each new assault on Everly with a fair degree of visual inventiveness.

Rating: 4/10 – uneven throughout, and lacking the flair needed to carry this beyond being just a vicarious thrill-ride, Everly is a balls-to-the-wall action movie whose reach is let down by its grasp; Hayek is great, but is let down by haphazard plotting and shifts in tone and perspective that don’t always work.