Long-standing Hollywood screenwriter Mike White has a knack for witty dialogue and clever characters that feel like they’ve been snatched out of reality, and with his feature-length sophmore film, Brad’s Status, he turns the life of an average, middle-aged man, into a story that’s larger than life.
Given its timely release, the deadpan, coal black comedy Beatriz at Dinner could easily be read as a trenchant metaphor for American political and social values under the Donald Trump regime, but it really gets to the icy heart of problems that have plagued America for longer than the orange tinted leader of the free world has been in power. The third collaboration between director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White (following Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl) is a balanced human drama so painfully close to the bone that the only option to avoid crying about the situation at hand is to uncomfortably laugh at it.
