I've recently noticed a disturbing trend in which movie trailers create what I think is a deliberately misleading impression of the movies they're supposed to illustrate. I've been sucked into watching several turkeys because their trailers were so enticing. The trailer for Beatriz at Dinner gives the impression of a modern-day drawing-room comedy: Plainspoken working-class Mexican woman (Salma Hayek) violates social norms at an upper-crust Anglo dinner party by taking a rich suave robber-baron (John Lithgow) bluntly to task for his nefarious societal & environmental depredations. Every comedic moment in the film is crowded into the trailer, making it seem like a much merrier movie than it turns out to be.
Naturally, the trailer doesn't show the irrelevant opening & closing scenes of a woman, presumably Beatriz, paddling a boat. Artistically cryptic, symbolically significant no doubt, but really... it comes across pretentious rather than portentous. That's a minor quibble, but to me it's a subtle warning sign.
The trailer doesn't show anything of Beatriz' brooding sorrow, despair or homicidal urges. Nor does it show her leaving long teary answering-machine messages for someone or other she evidently misses desperately — someone we soon come to suspect may no longer be alive, tho we'll never find out. So many things are hinted at in this film, but just left hanging & Hayek's powerful acting ends up wasted on a two-dimensional character who's never quite fleshed out.
Certainly nothing in the trailer leads you to expect the unhappy ending. Or is it?? Like so much of this film, that too is left to the viewer's interpretation. Given so little background or rationale, I'd say it's too shallow to be worth pondering. Movies that resort to ambiguous endings in hopes of pleasing — or maybe bamboozling? — everyone just end up falling between two chairs.
Maybe it's not as bad a film as I'm making it out to be, but it certainly isn't the film the trailer makes it out to be. And that was the film I actually wanted to see.
Naturally, the trailer doesn't show the irrelevant opening & closing scenes of a woman, presumably Beatriz, paddling a boat. Artistically cryptic, symbolically significant no doubt, but really... it comes across pretentious rather than portentous. That's a minor quibble, but to me it's a subtle warning sign.
The trailer doesn't show anything of Beatriz' brooding sorrow, despair or homicidal urges. Nor does it show her leaving long teary answering-machine messages for someone or other she evidently misses desperately — someone we soon come to suspect may no longer be alive, tho we'll never find out. So many things are hinted at in this film, but just left hanging & Hayek's powerful acting ends up wasted on a two-dimensional character who's never quite fleshed out.
Certainly nothing in the trailer leads you to expect the unhappy ending. Or is it?? Like so much of this film, that too is left to the viewer's interpretation. Given so little background or rationale, I'd say it's too shallow to be worth pondering. Movies that resort to ambiguous endings in hopes of pleasing — or maybe bamboozling? — everyone just end up falling between two chairs.
Maybe it's not as bad a film as I'm making it out to be, but it certainly isn't the film the trailer makes it out to be. And that was the film I actually wanted to see.