A
film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on July 7, 2021.
Money is the greatest
evil of all
is a familiar, relatable idea, and Mike
White’s limited series The White
Lotus adapts that observation of late-stage-capitalist ennui into
uncomfortable, revealing, insightful, and empathetic scenarios on an island
full of privileged people who are varyingly aware of how rarified their air
really is. The cast that White has assembled is game for balancing on the thin
wires strung up between horror, tragedy, and comedy, and the writing is
consistently precise, darkly funny, and thoroughly unsentimental about the ways
human beings knowingly and unknowingly hurt each other. Alternately hilarious
and unsettling, The White Lotus isn’t
a feel-good watch, but it is a must-watch.
White,
whose Enlightened, starring Laura
Dern, remains a treasure in HBO’s archives, returns to the network for the
six-part limited series The White Lotus.
The opening credits of The White Lotus
clue you into the series’ sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring wealth enables rot mentality: Beautiful,
tropical wallpaper designs of flowers, pineapples, iguanas, and leopards
stealthily transform into scenes of decay. Snakes hide among bunches of
bananas. Fruit rots on the vine. Caterpillars eat leaves until they hang limp,
pockmarked and dying. Jellyfish coil around people, seaweed strangles a fish,
and a three-person crew battles their canoe against a swelling wave. Will they
make it over, or be dragged under?
The White Lotus places that
question, in both literal and figurative incarnations, on the shoulders of each
character who arrives by chartered boat to the secluded, exclusive White Lotus
hotel and resort in Hawaii. In a Big
Little Lies-like opening-scene reveal, The
White Lotus shares that someone here will die, and then jumps back in time
one week. Among the vacationers are the Mossbacher family, comprising tech CEO
Nicole (Connie Britton), husband
Mark (Steve Zahn), college sophomore
daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and
her friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady),
and teen son Quinn (Fred Hechinger).
Also vacationing are newlyweds Shane (Jake
Lacy) and Rachel Patton (Alexandra
Daddario), and the grieving Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), who has brought her mother’s ashes to spread
into the ocean. These three parties aren’t friends, but they’re familiar with
each other in the way that people who cross paths at the beach, at the bar, in
the elevator, or in the hallway may be. They recognize each other as the same
kind of people, all part of the mega-wealthy who can afford this kind of place.
Meanwhile,
the White Lotus staff aims to be, as the fussy, finicky resort manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) tells employees in the
first episode Arrivals, to be more
generic, less individual. The goal, Armond explains, is to disappear behind our masks as pleasant, interchangeable helpers ... The
goal is to create for the guests an overall impression of vagueness that can be
very satisfying. Perhaps that’s good business practice, and for a state
like Hawaii - which survives on tourism, and whose citizens’ struggle against
ultra-rich outsiders is ongoing - it’s what keeps the wealthy tourists happy.
But then Armond takes it a step further, and Bartlett delivers an embittered
line delivery that cuts right to the staff/tourist divide: They get everything they want, but they don’t even know what they want.
Or what day it is. Or where they are, or who we are, or what the f**k is going
on.
Armond’s
mask for tolerating the guests’ whims, demands, and complaints is beginning to
slip, and his increasingly manic behavior worries spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell). She has an earnest
belief in holistic health, and she works too hard for too little pay, but she
dreams of one day opening a business that would make the spa’s offerings
affordable for everyone. (If Rothwell’s bombastic work on Insecure is your only awareness of her as an actress, be prepared
for her to blow you away with her nuanced, elastic work here. Her last moment
onscreen will haunt you.) And over the course of the week, Armand, Belinda, and
various other hotel staff members get drawn into the orbit of the guests, their
neuroses, and their selfishness, mostly for worse and rarely for better.
Perhaps
the idea of watching a group of rich people do rich-people things to the
chagrin of long-suffering less-than-rich sounds grueling. But The White Lotus hits the same notes as
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite by poking and
prodding at its characters’ class divide and offering up shreds of empathy and
compassion to individuals who are caught in systems, patterns, or behaviors
they can’t escape. Are the hotel guests cruel? In the way that Don Draper told
Michael Ginsberg that he doesn’t think about him at all, yes. Lacy’s Shane,
born into an elite family and constantly nagging new wife Rachel about why
she’s not having fun, makes an enemy out of Armond over a petty grievance.
Tanya, who covers her traumas and neuroses with layers of nude lip gloss and
designer caftans, gloms onto Belinda as her spiritual healer without ever
asking her questions about herself. And Olivia and Paula, in the midst of
reading Judith Butler and Franz Fanon, doing drugs and stirring up trouble, get
into a spat over a flirtation with a hotel worker.
In
each of these relationships, White digs deeper and deeper into what is making
all of these people unhappy, with each episode pivoting into a new perspective
and deftly balancing an array of tones. From Paula’s eyes, we see the
Mossbachers and their staunch refusal to acknowledge their own advantages. From
Mark’s eyes, we see his frustration with his marriage, and with the fact that
Nicole treats him like hired help rather than a husband. From Quinn’s eyes, we
see a genuine connection with a certain Hawaiian custom, and a true sense of
purpose, that Paula and Olivia had only gestured toward with their political
theory. The ensemble cast drops façade after façade, and the result is a
combination of performances that are nearly universally enthralling. Rothwell,
Coolidge, and Daddario are particularly excellent, with Coolidge’s Tanya
somehow being both awkward and deeply relatable, and Daddario imbuing Rachel
with a deer-in-the-headlights panic over her husband’s assumptions and
expectations. Britton comes alive in a scene against Daddario that makes you
hope the former actress gets more chances in her career to bare her teeth,
while Daddario’s final scene might be the most genuine, and heartbreaking, of
the series. And of the Mossbachers, Zahn and Hechinger have great chemistry as
a father-son duo who don’t know each other at all, and whose transformative
experiences on the island take them in wildly different directions.
Our
expectations of vacations are that they rejuvenate and reinvigorate us, with
the assumption being that the place we travel to offers peace of mind and
self-betterment that we can’t find at home. There’s both selfishness and
vulnerability to that belief, The White
Lotus argues, and which assessment you agree with at the end of the series
might not be what you thought when you began. White spins Have a nice vacation into both a blessing and a curse, and The White Lotus thrives in between those
extremes. [Hadadi’s rating: 4 stars out of 4]
Blogger’s comment: This six-part series was developed by HBO, thus its
streaming on HBO Max. For me there is almost no socially redeeming value to
this series and I admit that I only watched it for Alexandra Daddario’s
character, the bride who discovers on her honeymoon that her new husband is not
at all what she thought him to be and that she was only going to be his arm
candy as long as she remained sexually attractive to him.
I
should also mention that The White Lotus was
filmed almost entirely at the Four Seasons Maui Wailea resort, fronting Wailea
Beach on Maui, an area my wife and I know very well. We vacationed on Maui many
times between 1994 and 2016 and lived on-island three times for a total of four
years, including a home in Wailea Kialoa, a condo in Wailea Fairway Villas and
a three-bedroom duplex in Kai Malu at Wailea. Also, my wife did exclusive child
care at the Four Seasons resort and recognized many of the places shown in the
series, especially the restaurants and pools.
Labels:
comedy, drama, tragedy
IMDb 76/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=89, viewers=77)
HBO MAX
Online review
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