"Try healing something. That is hard." Film: BEATRIZ AT DINNER (2017)

The line comes late in "Beatriz at Dinner," after a billionaire has passed his phone around the table to show off a photo of a rhinoceros he shot. Everyone laughs politely. Beatriz, who is only there because her car would not start, does not. She tells him that anyone can kill. "You think killing is hard? Try healing something. That is hard." Then the table goes quiet, the way tables do when the help has said something true. Salma Hayek plays Beatriz, a massage therapist and holistic healer from a small town in Mexico who works at a cancer center in Los Angeles. One of her private clients, a wealthy woman played by Connie Britton, invites her to stay for dinner when her car dies in the driveway. The guest of honor is Doug Strutt, a real estate developer played by John Lithgow, the sort of man who builds hotels on beaches that used to belong to someone else. Beatriz's town was one of those beaches. She recognizes him, or thinks she does, and spends the rest of the evening trying to decide what to do about it. That is the whole film: one dinner party in Newport Beach, ninety minutes, and a woman who was never supposed to be at the table. Mike White wrote it and Miguel Arteta directed, the same pair who made "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," and it has their gift for making politeness feel like a weapon. Nobody at the party is a cartoon. The hosts are kind to Beatriz in the way you are kind to someone you have decided not to see. Lithgow's Doug is charming, funny, and completely certain that the world exists for him to take pieces of. He is not even cruel about it. That is what makes him unbearable. Hayek does something rare here. Beatriz barely raises her voice. She sits, she listens, she drinks a little too much wine, and you watch her face do the work of a woman deciding whether the thing she believes about healing can survive a room like this. The film premiered at Sundance in 2017, the week of the inauguration, and everyone read it as being about that. It was. It also outlasted that reading, because the question it asks is older: what do you owe a man who has wrecked what you love, when he is sitting across from you and asking you to pass the salt? The ending refuses to answer cleanly. Some people hate it for that. But the line about healing is the answer, if you want one. It is the harder thing, and the film knows it, and it does not pretend Beatriz finds it easy.