Excellent movie and so well acted, especially by Hayek and Lithgow. It's a film that completely subverts your expectations. A summary of the plot follows, please do not read if you don't want the ending spoiled
Salma Hayek plays a spiritual healer and masseuse, very much in tune with Nature and a lover of animals. (At the beginning her pet goat is killed by her neighbor, an act which weighs heavily on Hayek throughout the film. Visiting one of her wealthy clients her car breaks down after she has given her treatment and the client invites her to stay to dinner, a dinner which will be attended by Lithgow and his wife and another couple. Lithgow plays a ruthless entrepreneur and the dinner is to celebrate a new deal to build a hotel and shopping center. At dinner Hayek at first listens quietly but as the conversations turns to the many hotels Lithgow has built, including some in Mexico from where Hayek originates, she grows disturbed. She tells them that an American hotel was built in her native town and ended up with the eviction of the population and the death of her own father. It turns out that Lithgow had nothing to do with this but Hayek begins to see him as the embodiment of all evil, especially when he relates with pride how he killed a rhino on safari. Passing his cell round with the picture Hayek snaps and hurls the phone at him.
It is at this point that we realize Hayek's character is not what she seems and our sympathies switch. She is in fact a deeply troubled person capable of projecting all her past woes on anyone she meets whose views differ from hers. Lithgow now becomes the object of her murderous fantasies and she starts to believe if she kills him then the sufferings of the world will cease. Here the director has it both ways. We see Hayek sink a knife into Lithgow's neck killing him. In reality she drops the knife before she commits the act and leaves with the tow-truck, Lithgow never realizing how close he came to being the victim of a mentally-deranged woman. On the way home she asks the driver to pull over and we see her walk into the sea and submerge, killing herself rather than an innocent person.
I found this an immensely enjoyable film in which the director cleverly switches the sympathies of the audience from Hayek, portrayed almost as a saint at first, to Lithgow, who seemed the devil incarnate at the beginning. In short it's as if in the first half of the film we are seeing through the eyes of Hayek and in the second half we see the truth, that she is a very disturbed individual and Lithgow simply a businessman.
Salma Hayek plays a spiritual healer and masseuse, very much in tune with Nature and a lover of animals. (At the beginning her pet goat is killed by her neighbor, an act which weighs heavily on Hayek throughout the film. Visiting one of her wealthy clients her car breaks down after she has given her treatment and the client invites her to stay to dinner, a dinner which will be attended by Lithgow and his wife and another couple. Lithgow plays a ruthless entrepreneur and the dinner is to celebrate a new deal to build a hotel and shopping center. At dinner Hayek at first listens quietly but as the conversations turns to the many hotels Lithgow has built, including some in Mexico from where Hayek originates, she grows disturbed. She tells them that an American hotel was built in her native town and ended up with the eviction of the population and the death of her own father. It turns out that Lithgow had nothing to do with this but Hayek begins to see him as the embodiment of all evil, especially when he relates with pride how he killed a rhino on safari. Passing his cell round with the picture Hayek snaps and hurls the phone at him.
It is at this point that we realize Hayek's character is not what she seems and our sympathies switch. She is in fact a deeply troubled person capable of projecting all her past woes on anyone she meets whose views differ from hers. Lithgow now becomes the object of her murderous fantasies and she starts to believe if she kills him then the sufferings of the world will cease. Here the director has it both ways. We see Hayek sink a knife into Lithgow's neck killing him. In reality she drops the knife before she commits the act and leaves with the tow-truck, Lithgow never realizing how close he came to being the victim of a mentally-deranged woman. On the way home she asks the driver to pull over and we see her walk into the sea and submerge, killing herself rather than an innocent person.
I found this an immensely enjoyable film in which the director cleverly switches the sympathies of the audience from Hayek, portrayed almost as a saint at first, to Lithgow, who seemed the devil incarnate at the beginning. In short it's as if in the first half of the film we are seeing through the eyes of Hayek and in the second half we see the truth, that she is a very disturbed individual and Lithgow simply a businessman.