‘The White Lotus’ Review: Scathingly Good Acting Helps Rescue Thailand-Set Season 3 of Mike White’s HBO Series From Fatigue
If you bemoan the reboot/remake culture in film and television for long enough, somebody will inevitably bring up theater.
Why, pray tell, is it creatively bankrupt to rehash Doogie Howser, M.D., or American Gigolo, but perfectly acceptable for productions of Macbeth or Oedipus or Oklahoma! to come and go in regular cycles? You don’t watch a new production of Romeo & Juliet to see if those crazy underaged lovers will make it this time, but to experience how a new director and cast put a personal stamp on the material — and how, through finding distinctive elements within a familiar story, you can still be moved or astonished.
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It may be worth considering that when approaching Mike White’s new season of The White Lotus.
The HBO satirical anthology — miscategorized for Emmy purposes as a “drama” — returns this weekend after an absence of more than two years, and it’s likely to face some criticism that its formula has become, well, formulaic.
From the season-opening intimations of a shocking death to the deceptions and self-delusions of the roster of solipsistic, wealthy, mostly white, mostly American protagonists seeking escape in the hermetically sealed opulence of a luxury retreat, White has his withering critique of privileged parasitism down to a science. There are strong hints in the six episodes sent to critics that the archetypes and commentary have become, if not stale, very comfortably entrenched.
So why did I enjoy these six episodes of White Lotus so much? It isn’t for the season-long mystery, which never engaged me even the first time around, nor the various taboos that White enjoys teasing, nor the carefully constructed and telegraphed revelations. I don’t mind those things, but some been-there-done-that has begun to set in. What remains fresh, though, is the interpretation.
If Ryan Murphy’s approach to anthologizing has been to build a recurring troupe and put the same actors through different paces, White has gone the opposite way. The pleasure of watching his sublime, regularly refreshed casts play his mostly venal, barb-throwing characters against gorgeous backdrops remains unabated, with third season standouts including Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Aimee Lou Wood among many others dancing along to Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s nearly tribal score.
After the show establishes that at some point there will be gunshots and a body floating in a meditation pond, we quickly backtrack to meet the characters booked for a week at White Lotus’ ultra-exclusive Thai wellness spa.
Arriving via boat are the Ratliff family, with the exaggerated accents of North Carolina royalty. There’s financier patriarch Timothy (Jason Isaacs), antsy matriarch Victoria (Posey), ultra bro-y eldest son Saxon (Schwarzenegger), slouching high-school senior Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and college-aged Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), whose Buddhism-adjacent thesis was the motivation for the trip. Then there’s television star Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), reuniting for a week with childhood pals Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Kate (Leslie Bibb). Keeping to themselves are nervously chain-smoking Rick (Goggins) and girlfriend Chelsea (Wood), unaware that they’re going to a place where “balding, middle-aged guy and nubile girlfriend” is a prevailing cliché.
Everybody is pretending they’re coming to the resort for massages and yoga and therapies, but they all have ulterior motives, secrets and things they’re running away from — and they’re all armed with an arsenal of verbal scorn aimed at strangers and loved ones alike.
The characters aren’t all venal, mind you. Providing continuity from the first season is Belinda (Natasha Rothwell, lighting the series’ dark corners with a glow of general decency), who you’ll recall grew close to Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, but never heard back on the promise of financial backing for her own spa. We know what happened to Tanya in season two, but Belinda initially does not, as she arrives in Thailand as part of a White Lotus global exchange program.
After the first White Lotus season earned pushback for largely erasing the presence of Hawaiian natives — I would argue that was a reflection of how tourists of this type erase the real world surrounding their vacation getaways — the second season gave us lovelorn Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) and morally flexible Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò).
The Thailand season splits the difference with a sweet, wafer-thin love story between resort employees Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and Mook (Lalisa “Lisa From Blackpink” Manobal), plus the regal bearing of resort co-owner Sritala (Lek Patravadi) — storylines in which the locals are present, but not integral. The failure to make the Thai characters more complicated shortchanges the actors, particularly Manobal, who has a surfeit of charisma but very little to do with it, even in a later episode that teases Mook dancing as part of the resort’s entertainment, then barely features one of the world’s more internationally recognizable celebrities.
White has conceived of the resort experience as these enclaves of hollow men, people capable of addressing all of their material needs, but nothing deeper. In the first season, the Hawaiian backdrop emphasized the guests’ cultural hollowness. In the second, the Italian setting emphasized their lack of history and roots. In Thailand, where temples, shrines and monasteries abound, the thing that most of our characters lack is spiritual wholeness, with only Piper arriving thinking that Buddhism might hold the answers. Of course, most of the characters in The White Lotus are too fixated on primal desires — getting drunk, getting laid, checking emails from work — to even notice the paradise. So is White taking a superficial approach to Thailand, its traditions and its tragedies, or are his insular characters? One can lean toward the latter opinion while still wishing, with the longest White Lotus season to date, for more nuance.
Especially in the first three episodes, this season of The White Lotus is a very slow burn in terms of plot. That’s partially by character-driven design, partially because of White’s structural preferences — according to which every hovering tragedy has to be carefully teased long before it happens — and mostly because it’s hard not to feel like the Ratliffs, all up in each other’s personal business to an uncomfortable degree, aren’t a Tobacco Row version of the Mossbachers from the first season. Or that Rick, in his shady desperation, doesn’t look a lot like Jon Gries’ Greg.
White is aware of the echos he’s building into the expanded White Lotus universe, but you can’t always tell when that echoing is foreshadowing, when it’s misdirection and when it’s self-plagiarism. It’s probably all three.
White uses the razor’s edge of his eviscerating dialogue to build suspense far more effectively than he does the rudimentary shell-game involving an ominously introduced gun or threats relating to nature — lizards, monkeys and the tragic specter of the 2004 Thai tsunami loom.
It turns out that I don’t require anything to enjoy The White Lotus. I just need three childhood friends gossiping about each other in different permutations (and giving us a mention of Donald Trump and that version of “the real world”), Saxton’s intrusive interest in his siblings’ sex lives, or Rick’s defensive cruelty to the young woman who thinks of herself as his soulmate. Watching out of anticipated schadenfreude or, very occasionally, out of hope for redemption is more satisfying for me than guessing the identity of a floating body. All I need is for the ensemble to be on White’s wavelength and, once again, it generally is.
There are broadly comedic performances, like Posey drenching every line reading in Deep South entitlement or Sex Education favorite Wood oozing blithe optimism even as the universe keeps suggesting she’s in trouble. There are the performances that work best in intimate interplay, like Coon, Bibb and Monaghan as the three “cougars,” who share mannerisms and in-jokes and insecurities.
Goggins, twitchy and exhausted perfection, matches well with anybody, whether it’s Wood or an Emmy-bound midseason guest star I won’t spoil. Seemingly auditioning for an American Psycho television series, Schwarzenegger has never been more impeccably cast than as a tightly wound Patrick Bateman-esque sociopath with underlying fragility. Isaacs is exceptional as a man whose own fragility rises almost immediately to the surface (though you have to accept that his Southern accent ranges from Foghorn Leghorn to nonexistent, depending on the moment).
After the COVID-based production restrictions, White has enjoyed showcasing locations and, as the season goes along and characters take extensive journeys on yachts or detour into Bangkok, the setting is sumptuous and beautifully photographed. And even when the characters are just at the resort, cinematographer Ben Kutchins makes the most of the monkeys and the morning breakfast buffet, which at this point is as much a part of the White Lotus brand as backstabbing and backstory-concealing.
I can reassure viewers who find the start of the season slow that things pick up dramatically, especially in the fifth or sixth episodes, which have events perched precariously on the verge of disaster. Will that inevitable disaster take a form that doesn’t feel, at least somewhat, like a reboot of previous White Lotus installments? I can’t say for sure, but if you accept that the joy is in the interpretation, it’s enough to watch the new group revel in the toxic treats that Mike White so readily supplies.
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