Rich and shameless
It takes true perversity to program The White Lotus, a new HBO miniseries about tourists whose expectations for their stay at a luxury Hawaiian hotel fall far short, at a time when Americans can finally travel in mass-vaccinated safety. What more relatable fantasy is there right now than the one of quarantine-induced marital or familial tensions dissipating in the island breeze?
But creator Mike White (Enlightened), isn’t interested in dreams so much as the nightmare of reality. His version of a tropical idyll among the idle rich only underscores the fact that hardly any of his characters are able to appreciate the lush nature they presumably came to experience. The sun-dappled White Lotus Hotel, secluded, opulent, attracts guillotine-worthy guests convinced they’re not being pampered and catered to enough, goading the hotel manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett), first into small rebellions against a customer, then a full-blown spiral in a textbook case of trickle-down callousness.
HBO has recently cornered the market on terrible (mostly), white rich people through such shows as Succession, Big Little Lies, Veep, The Undoing and The Righteous Gemstones.
The characters and the performances from Lotus’s cast make for a twisty, queasy, sweatily claustrophobic drama. The series’ satirical mordant wit is typified by college friends Olivia (Sydney Sweeney), and Paula (Brittany O’grady), sarcastic, know-it-all teens whose vacation reading list of Freud, Nietzsche and Butler unnerve those around them. On the boat ride from a larger island to the more exclusive one the White Lotus occupies, Olivia and Paula size up, with rough precision, the other guests. The attractive honeymooners with their arms around each other? He’s (Jake Lacy), a Dartmouth type; she’s (Alexandra Daddario), pretty enough to work in fashion or marketing.
The solitary older woman (Jennifer Coolidge), whom they guess is meeting her friends on a girls trip? “She gets on their nerves but she pays for everything so they put up with her.”
The photogenic middle-aged couple (Steve Zahn and Connie Britton), whose outward ease may conceal an everyday sort of insidiousness.
Olivia’s parents, who badly want to reconnect with her and her 16-year-old brother Quinn (Fred Hechinger), not least because one of them is nervously anticipating a phone call with an oncologist about some test results.
There’s plenty here of White’s tart sensibility, queer boundary-pushing and serrated observations of how self-loathers tend to spread their wretchedness to those around them.
The trollish timing of the show’s premise, that vacations are wasted on those who least need it, certainly deserves some grudging admiration.
But a swerve late in the series disappointingly sails the story toward calmer waters. Once the turbulence is over, only froth remains.