Our moral betters in Hollywood have a new movie offering in which John Lithgow represents the callous, white billionaire hotel owner and Salma Hayek as the downtrodden Mexican immigrant. One look at the trailer and one wonders why they didn’t just come right out and call Lithgow’s character Donald Trump.
The movie, Beatriz at Dinner, is an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and is described as a dark comedy:
Beatriz (Salma Hayek), an immigrant from a poor town in Mexico, has drawn on her innate kindness to build a career as a health practitioner in Los Angeles. Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) is a cutthroat, self-satisfied billionaire. When these two opposites meet at a dinner party, their worlds collide and neither will ever be the same.
Beatriz is hailed by the wealthy female lead (Connie Britton) as “a healer,” “a saint,” and having wizard-like abilities to control the flight path of birds. But Lithgow’s character just sees her as the hired help who should fetch him another bourbon. (See where they’re going with this?)
For the remainder of the trailer, Beatriz is berated by the billionaire who questions if she came to America legally or “danced in Vegas.” But Beatriz finally loses it when she finds out the evil, Trump-like man hunts big game. When she is shown a picture of his African rhinoceros trophy, Beatriz throws the phone back at him in anger, saying, “I think this is sick!”
Then, Lithgow’s character takes a page from Trump’s campaign speeches and tells her that America doesn’t need her “feelings, it needs jobs, it needs money, it needs what I do.”
And it all unravels from there, but with the hint that in the end, Beatriz will be the lone voice of reason. That’s probably why a Yahoo! critic said it’s “the first great film of the Trump era.” The parallels are just that obvious.
As Legal Insurrection noted, the cast appeared in a promotional video in which Hayek praised the Women’s March for sending Trump the message that, “We are America, too.” She also called him “President Trump” and gasped realizing that’s the first time she had actually said the words. She obviously suffers from #NotMyPresident syndrome.
Must be super nice inside that Hollywood bubble, moralizing from on top of those huge piles of cash.



