Beatriz at Dinner (2017, Miguel Arteta) (Patreon)

21/100

Do you cheer and fist-pump when an activist barges into a private luncheon—not a corporate event or anything like that—and dumps some rapacious industrialist's bowl of soup on his head? If so, this is the movie for you. Like Sachs' Little Men (which I likewise hated), it asks us to identify with truly obnoxious behavior by someone toward whom we'd otherwise feel sympathetic, ostensibly justified in this case by making one of the targets irredeemably awful. (The others are just slightly awful.) Mike White's smug, self-righteous script never once suggests that Beatriz is anything other than a deeply good person trapped among shallow, self-absorbed wealthy racists—a tiresomely one-dimensional dynamic. Nor is Hayek asked to give a performance so much as just stand around shooting death glares at everyone else's inane and insensitive chatter. I often love an unlikeable protagonist, but we're clearly meant to approve, not recoil, when e.g. Beatriz throws the mogul's phone at him after being shown a photo of a rhinoceros he killed on a hunt. If you find the company you're in (by accident) insupportable, get up and leave! Instead, she keeps coming back to hurl more insults, culminating in a risible fantasy and too-pure-for-this-world finale (artlessly juxtaposed with the rich folks' oblivious celebration of their toxic existence). Best I can say is that Britton, Sevigny, and to some extent even Lithgow try to inject a little humanity into the blithe caricatures they've been assigned. I can imagine a version of Beatriz at Dinner that I might like, but it would either (a) go considerably further in that direction or (b) acknowledge that a person can be at once absolutely morally correct and a complete asshole. 

And that's a wrap on my pointless 2017 completism, meaning I've now seen (or W/O'd on) that year's top 50 films as per my annual concatenation of year-end polls. Again, I usually do all of this prior to submitting my Skandies ballot; that year's Voice poll was published ridiculously late, and then I put it off for...well, three years, obviously.