Last year, I was part of the early
cheering section for the first season of HBO’s sublime The White Lotus, Mike
White’s extraordinary limited series about the title resort in Hawaii featuring
the worst aspects of the one percent and the beleaguered staff that had to deal
with them. For reasons that made sense
at the time, I gave the series the equivalent of an honorable mention on my
Best of 2021 list but did not list it among the ten best of the year. In
hindsight, my decision to list David E. Kelley’s collective work of 2021 was the
most deeply flawed choice by comparison: Big Sky was extraordinary that
season, but Nine Perfect Strangers was far more flawed. I was happier to hear that The White Lotus
was renewed for a second season than Strangers was.
It took a while for the love for The
White Lotus to reach critical mass: Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge got
more than their share of recognition but it was until the HCA TV Award
nominations came out in June that it finally began to get the love it deserved.
Did the entire cast deserve to get all those Emmy nominations? I’ve been
debated that since July, particularly as it did seem to come at the expense of
so many other great series such as The Dropout and Maid? But all
that said the ensemble was, each in their own way, pitch perfect in their roles.
(I’m still on the fence when it comes to Sydney Sweeney, though.) And even
though I thought Dopesick and The Dropout were extraordinary
series, my heart was happy when the series took home ten Emmys this September.
Part of it was due to my desire to see Mike White, a talent I have admired for
years finally get the recognition he deserves from some major award show. And a
larger part of it was due to the fact that, with the sole exception of Big
Little Lies, I can’t remember a single limited series that has dominated
the nominations, much less the awards, whose main argument for being was to
have fun. Yes, there was a message at just how awful the truly rich are on
vacation as they are in society, but you were laughing too hard most of the
time at everybody – Steve Zahn’s ridiculous awkwardness around his family, Murray
Bartlett’s trying to remain professional in his war with Jake Lacy, everything
Jennifer Coolidge did – to notice the message until later. Ever since White
decided – well before the awards started coming - to give the show a second season, albeit as
an anthology I have been waiting with bated breath to see what happen next.
Last Sunday, the second season began and if anything, it's starting off even
stronger than the first one.
This White Lotus is set in Rome,
so while there are still glamorous beaches and scenery, there is also a very
great amount of shopping and resorts nearby as well as something that was very conspicuous
absent from the first one – prostitutes and sexual energy in general. You might
remember that for all the glamor that was going on in the first season, most of
the guests were not having sex, not even the couple on their honeymoon
and Armond ended up getting more action than most of his guests. From the
opening credits White makes it very clear there’s going to be a lot more sexual
action in the season, and while some might find this exploitive, I think most people
will find it more realistic. If we want to see rich people behaving badly, we
want to see it in the bedroom and this season is more than willing to oblige.
Just as in the opening season, the
second starts with all the guests arriving on a giant boat. There’s two couples
who are on a group vacation: Cameron and Daphne (Theo James and Meghann Fahy)
silicon valley billionaires and Cameron’s college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe)
and his very prickly wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza!). There’s the Di Grasso men,
grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham) his
bitter son, Dominic (Michael Imperioli) and his son Albie (Adam). And as
promised, Tanya is back, who is meeting her husband Greg here (Jon Gries,
clearly showing the experience of living with Tanya) and her assistant, Portia
(Haley Lu Richardson). Lucia is the new concierge (a sublime Simone Tabasco)
and she is clearly made of different material than Armond was. Armond was
capable of putting up a front even as things began to spiral. Lucia doesn’t
even bother with from the moments the guests she arrived, and even though she’s
younger than Armond, you see she has infinitely less patience with even going
through the motions with the staff or the guests. There are also two women
named Mia and Valentina, who are clearly prostitutes but still have enough
illusions to think there’s upward mobility.
They’re watching looking for sugar daddies.
In the opening scenes of Season 1,
most of the guests seemed to be here to have a good time or blow off steam. From
the beginning of Season 2, most of the guests clearly seem to be having trouble
through the motions. The only people who seem happy all the time are Cameron
and Daphne and Harper doesn’t believe it for a second. (“No couple doesn’t
fight,” she tells her husband.) But then this particular couple doesn’t seem to
exist in reality: they happily tell their friends they don’t watch the news
because it’s so stressful, Daphne cheerfully tells them she loves watching
shows where wives murder their husbands, and they don’t even seem to have respect
for other millionaires in Europe. Harper wants to do good, and they seem to
mock her in public and berate her in private. It’s pretty clear from the start
that Cameron is trying to seduce Harper, mainly because he sees her as a
challenge rather than he finds her attractive. At this point in the series
Harper seems the most grounded character of the bunch, but as we’ve learned
from the show, first impressions can be deceived.
Dominic’s problems are far greater:
his marriage has self-destructed because of a sex addiction; his wife has no
use for him and their daughter hasn’t come on the trip. Bert has come on this trip to find his Sicilian
roots, but almost from the beginning he goes out of his way to blame Dom for
the separation in the worst way possible. He used the mythological story of
Hades and Demeter to claim that nothing Bert has done could be as bad, admonishes his son for having affairs and when
Dom reminds of his own affairs, Bert laughs them off as ‘peccadillos!” Dom is
clearly a weak man, he has no problem picking up one of the girls in the first
episode and when they openly say they want to use him as a sugar daddy, he agrees
very quickly and can barely put up much of a front when Lucia, justifiably, calls
him on it. “The three of them will be sleeping in your bed?” she said when he says
they will be staying in his room. He protests loudly and by the end of last
night’s episode is having a threesome with them.
As for Tanya, we know full too well
how incapable of change she is, and you almost feel sympathy for the lack of
patience Greg shows with her, particularly when Portia is right there. (“It’s
not like she’ll be in our bed!” she protests.) Greg is protesting about her
weight from the beginning, is hiding secret phone calls and when he tells her that
he has to go to Colorado, and they have a fight: he calls her on all of her bad
behavior, and naturally she deflects it on Greg. You can’t exactly blame him
for having an affair given our last experience with Tanya, we know how much
oxygen she takes up every time she enters a room or anywhere.
At this point our sympathy is
clearly with Portia who came on this trip and now has to spend it keeping out
of sight not to upset her boss. She’s fragile from the beginning and clearly
sees the only way she can make some movement if she sticks this out. (If you
remember Tanya last offer to help someone, we all know how naïve Portia is.)
She finds herself on a date with Albie, who says he has gone on this trip with
his father, who he clearly has issues with, because he’s the peacemaker in the
family. He doesn’t want to end up like his dad (and given what we’ve seen of
his grandfather, that’s probably something Dom once wanted.) Portia also
clearly gives some more backstory to Tanya, saying theirs a possibility her
father abused her and given how badly her mother treated her, that does give us
some insight into her. (Though given how Jennifer Coolidge leans into it, you
have a hard time holding on to it.)
Now to the opening, Just as in
Season 1, we open with another dead body at the White Lotus and one clear example
of who it isn’t: Daphne goes on a swim and discovers a floating corpse. There’s
a big twist, though: by the time Lucia gets there, a frantic concierge is
telling her that there are ‘many’ bodies there.
So once again the question is, who’s dead? The only person who seems
safe is Tanya because White has made it clear if there is a third season, she’s
going to have another vacation. So who is it? Did Daphne give in to her murder
porn fantasy and kill her husband? Did Dom finally go too far with his sex addiction
(HBO series don’t tend to end well for Michael Imperioli’s characters)? Did
Bert, who’s already fallen over a deck, fall off a cliff and end up drowning?
There are always a lot of possibilities, and as we saw last season, White has a
way of pulling the rug out from under you at the last possible moment.
There’s a good chance, given the
advance notice, that the second season of The White Lotus will get praise
and massive nominations from awards shows starting in the next few months. I’m
personally rooting for Abraham and Plaza, both of whom have labored in
masterpieces in Peak TV and never got a win (or in Plaza’s case, even a
nomination). I would also love to see Coolidge back in the ranks again and it
would be fitting for Imperioli to get another nomination now that he’s come
home. Perhaps it would be excessive for the show to get as many nominations and
awards as it did the first time out, but then again, isn’t excess exactly what The
White Lotus is about? In the meantime, at the end of another year of
darkness, pull of a chair, have a nice Chianti, and watch Jennifer Coolidge try
to ride a Vespa. Just as last year, we need fun more than ever, and White will
always provide it. I hope there is a third season and we end up going somewhere
just as exotic and fun. We all need a vacation, even if it’s with people we don’t
want to go on vacation with.
My score: 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment