From the left: Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb appear in a scene from the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus.Fabio Lovino/The Associated Press
The White Lotus chain of high-end resorts scattered around the world will no doubt take a hit in the Tripadvisor ratings after another outburst of murder and mayhem at one of its locations.
But, in these getaways for the extra-privileged, creator, writer and director Mike White has found the perfect fictional five-star site for an HBO anthology TV series – one that has allowed him to keep the dramatic and darkly comic quality at the highest level through the third, Thailand-set instalment that premieres this Sunday on Crave.
White has nailed consistency in shocks and service in a way has eluded so much self-contained story-a-season prestige fare from True Detective to Fargo.
The key is that each White Lotus functions in the way the “green world” that Canadian critic Northop Frye theorized about does in classic literature.
These vacation spots act like the forests to which so many Shakespearean characters run to escape the real world, only to up find themselves confronted with the messy realities of their true identities (or lack thereof) and unleashed impulses. These luxury spas are not far from what Frye described: “The dream world that we create of our own desires … that collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of the world of experience.”
The latest season of The White Lotus begins, once more, with a flash-forward to death.
A young Black American, whose identity would be a spoiler to reveal, is in a meditation session when gunshots start to ring out – and he catches a glimpse of a body floating in a pool of water.
Cue the caption: One Week Earlier.
White has never shied away from classical allusions in the interlinked stories he’s constructed for his groups of actors to explore in bathing suits in jaw-dropping locales.
Played by consummate character actor Walton Goggins (Justified, Fallout), Rick – crassly smoking cigarettes at a wellness centre – is a character who gradually is revealed to be a melancholy, introspective American Hamlet on a belated mission of revenge. He has a naive younger girlfriend Chelsea – played, tilted toward comedy, by Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood – to whom he alternates being kind and cruel. As her position as Ophelia in his story becomes apparent, the fear she’ll be the one meeting a watery death rises.
The wealthy Ratliffs, meanwhile, provide a central story of hubris with undertones of incest to rival that of the ancient Greeks – one that seems poised to end with any or all dead.
Headed by seemingly successful and highly stressed North Carolina financier Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and skittish snob Virginia (Parker Posey), the Ratliff family’s children are a divided bunch.
Oldest son Saxon (a deliciously dislikable Patrick Schwarzenegger) is in the family business and obsessed with money, bodybuilding and sex, while daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is a religious studies major on a quest to deepen her Buddhism.
The youngest, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), is pulled between worldly pleasures and spirituality – the theme of the season. “What if this life is just a test, to see if we can be better people?” he wonders.
If it is, those most failing the test are three female friends who have reunited in middle age for a “girls’ trip.” Michelle Monaghan plays a well-known actor with a younger husband; Leslie Bibb is the well-off wife of a rich, red-state husband; the great Carrie Coon is a lawyer who hasn’t risen to their same financial heights and is pitied for imperfections in her family.
Saxon, eyeing these three American women from a chaise longue, calls them “cougars” – and their entanglement with a male Russian staff member, and the way they turn on each other while drinking wine from glasses the size of a baby’s head, seems the most inevitable. But even here, there’s an extra level of resonance – and their fraying friendships become an allegory for a U.S. pulled between the poles of Los Angeles, Austin and New York.
The casting of The White Lotus is truly a cut above – with character and talent matched in a way that trumps the algorithmic celebrity-skewed approach that has diminished so many other limited series of late and led to such crimes as Nicole Kidman becoming over-exposed.
In addition to such pleasure of watching actors the calibre of Goggins and Coon sink their teeth into surprising roles, there’s the intriguing presence of Canada’s Charlotte Le Bon making a season four set in Quebec City seem like a genuine possibility; and the stunning one of German actor Christian Friedel, fresh off playing Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in The Zone of Interest, as the general manager running the White Lotus Thailand.
Posey, in the role of the the insecure, wealthy Lorazepam-popping Victoria, holds the promise of being the stand-in for Jennifer Coolidge’s late, lamented Tanya McQuoid in the series. But Tanya is still in the show, in spirit (see the theme of the season), from the moment we spy Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the spa manager she betrayed in the first instalment.
I’ll say no more on that except that an added element of this show’s success is HBO’s impressive ability to keep secrets from leaving the set.
