In Bloom: THE WHITE LOTUS

Writer-director Mike White knows wealth is a poison. The ways privilege infects a mind and soul has been the background hum of his work over the last decade, sometimes bubbling up to the surface. His two-season HBO comedy-drama Enlightened took a corporate exec and watched her spiral as she tried to put her life back together. His Beatriz at Dinner stranded a working-class Mexican-American masseuse at a client’s party where a bloviating racist mogul oozes non-stop Trumpian chatter. His Brad’s Status found a Ben Stiller of anxiety burbling out of a college tour that highlighted an aging man caught between the separation of the very wealthy from the merely well-off. But all this swirling interest in inequality and its effects, so well-attuned to the currents underlying whorls of outrage, finds a refinement and culmination in The White Lotus, a six-hour resort-set miniseries HBO finished airing tonight. (There’s already word it’ll get another season with a new location and new cast; here’s hoping it’ll be just as good.) This work is a reaction to and dissection of the prevailing culture of the time in a way that’s bleakly hilarious, simultaneously sympathetically observed and witheringly, pitilessly critical. It’s a low-simmer melodrama, even a tragedy in some of its dimensions, wrapped in a dazzling social comedy of manners and errors. There’s rot in this here resort, and it’s not the staff. We watch as the wealthy bring all their problems on vacation, and, if they leave with a step up to a better life, it’s often, whether they’re aware of it or not, on the backs of those they view as beneath them. In our economy, what’s trickling down from the one percent is the pitch black toxin of their privilege.

White sets up an ensemble of guests arriving at the eponymous Hawaiian resort, some more likable than others. There’s a Big Tech boss (Connie Britton), her insecure husband (Steve Zahn) and their two near-grown children (Sydney Sweeney and Fred Hechinger) with a friend (Brittany O’Grady). There’s a newlywed real estate heir (Jake Lacy) and wife (Alexandra Daddario). There’s a spacey, needy inscrutably wealthy (Jennifer Coolidge) with her mother’s ashes in tow. They show up hoping to get away from it all, but find they’ve brought their emotional issues and interpersonal melodramas with them. White stages their criss-crossing dilemmas with a great skill for juggling complications in rich juxtapositions that build up momentum and sharply timed shaping to each hour. No one plot thread gets more or less attention than feels exactly right.

Through the course of their days, relationships start to chafe. There’s something about a vacation that lets one really confront a traveling companion’s true self, who they really are when the quotidian day-to-day goes away. White sees how these awful people’s flaws are the reasons for their unhappiness. No wonder vacation is no perfect balm; they are the ones they need to escape. All they’ve done is bring their whirling problems—insecurities, jealousies, inadequacies—to rest among the locals and staff forced to put on a happy face and put up with them. We see the annoyance behind the Fawlty grins of the hotel manger (Murray Bartlett) and empathetic spa manager (Natasha Rothwell). They want to do their jobs well, but these guests sure make it difficult sometimes. There are unmistakable optics to these wealthy white privileged overgrown babies looking to be coddled—throwing tantrums about booking errors, or wandering listlessly in search of a drink, or validation—arriving on the shores of a tropical island with all the presumption of ownership.

It’s underlined by the teen’s friend admitting her college research is on colonialism. (Big topic, the dad shrugs.) The colonizer/colonized relationship not only isn’t dead, it’s here. We meet a native Hawaiian working at the resort (Kekoa Scott Kekumano) who says his family is fighting his place of employment in a land dispute. We see an employee strung along by a time-suck of a guest who dangles the prospect of funding her business idea. We see the hotel manager increasingly frazzled by the unrelenting demands of a blood-boilingly entitled guy’s inability to let a small problem go. This hotel is a paradise of astonishing views, sumptuously photographed in every crashing wave and painterly sunset, and it’s filled with the pettiest, shallowest, tunnel-visioned people. The ensemble is uniformly strong—biting off snappy lines and wallowing in self-loathing or despicable behavior, all the worse when it’s tossed off so casually as to not see the impact, even on their supposed loved ones. They’re too busy rushing off to the next sex, drugs, alcohol, conference call, spa treatment, or scuba training on their to-do list.

White writes the upstairs-downstairs dynamic with aplomb, clearly having great empathy for the genuine pain all parties find themselves in, while allowing the dialogue to sparkle and snap with the most laser-focused incisive satirical detail. He lets the truly loathsome distinguish themselves from the merely troubled with their own words—digging holes for others to fall into. Watch how a well-meaning person accidentally ruins a life; or a high-society mother (Molly Shannon) swoops in chanting about the benefits of money, money, money; or a seemingly good-intentioned offer becomes just another heartbreak when a new distraction comes along. In total, the six hours add up to a compelling piece of work, as hilarious as it is sad, as enraging and it is engaging. Even the score, a howling, near-hyperventilating pseudo-Hawaiian folk song theme that settles into lovely languors of classical music or tribal hymns, captures the uncertain mood. The season builds to a fevered finale in which agonies and ecstasies are approached and sometimes tipped over, and ends in a grand melancholy disappointment and a note of tenuous, fleeting near-hope. White sees the worst in his characters while also seeing the full complexity and context behind these qualities. He loves, and he loathes, sometimes at once. He transcends caricature to find real, complicated portraits of these particular people. He finds moments of grace, and moments of criticism, and moments when characters finally collide in inevitable disagreements. And he understands the greater societal impact their flaws have. He watches as no matter what happens, these guests are free to go take their chaos elsewhere and leave others to pick up the consequences.

The Stoned Identity: AMERICAN ULTRA

What if Jason Bourne was a small-town stoner? That’s the only question (and sole joke) screenwriter Max Landis and director Nima Nourizadeh bring to American Ultra, a secret-agent-who-doesn’t-know-it action comedy that sits squarely in the disjunction between those two elements. The protagonist is a stringy-haired convenience store clerk (Jesse Eisenberg) who spends his days smoking pot and loving his patient girlfriend (Kristen Stewart). Unbeknownst to him, he’s been trained and brainwashed by a secret government program that is now preparing to shut down and must eliminate him to contain loose ends. When heavily armed baddies arrive at the store, he snaps into action, handily dispatching them with alarming speed and dexterity. But he’s still just a panic-attack-prone pothead in West Virginia, entirely unprepared to deal with these suddenly resurging hidden powers as the dangerous situation around him escalates. It’s only a little exciting, and largely unfunny.

The division between a befuddled stoner struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy and calm in the face of ridiculous events and a coolly capable man of action is the source of the movie’s appeal and frustration. On the one hand, Eisenberg is such a compelling screen presence he easily takes the role and bends it towards his stammering, self-effacing, slightly overwhelmed, frazzled comfort zone. On the other, the spy material is handled by yanking between notably violent action and office scenes back at Langley between agents (Connie Britton, Topher Grace, Tony Hale, and Bill Pullman) playing like flat sitcoms with all the jokes clipped out. It’s jarring to sit in a scene where a hyperventilating Eisenberg pours his heart out to Stewart, bringing real emotional intensity, then hop to Grace flailing in search of punchlines that will never arrive.

Listless from beginning to end, the movie never really comes to life or forms a satisfying whole. Oh, sure, there are moderately clever action beats involving improvised weapons formed on the fly from everyday objects. There’s touching chemistry between Eisenberg and Stewart (reuniting after their lovely Adventureland coupling) who take their relationship through some unexpected twists. There are funny little moments given over to Walton Goggins, John Leguizamo, and Lavell Crawford as eccentric shady characters, while Stuart Greer turns in a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of what starts as a stereotypical gruff sheriff. But all that only becomes grist for an unrelenting mill of overly self-aware plot and violence, churning through characters and incidents with bloody single-mindedness. The town is increasingly besieged, twisty conspiracies are unraveled, and the movie becomes more of a slave to its clunky genre elements.

The closer we stick with our two lead character’s subjective experience, the better. That’s where the real tension – both suspense and comedy – arrives. Nourizadeh’s debut film, the partially enjoyable teen party found footage comedy Project X, featured a reasonably involving escalation. Landis’s previous script, the found footage superpowers horror movie Chronicle, enjoyed the nervous tension of ordinary people discovering frightening capabilities within themselves. Together they seem to posses the power to make a good version of the American Ultra concept, but the results are slack. Tension flatlines despite increasingly noisier setpieces. Characters don’t deepen beyond broad bland traits. A game cast is stranded in an ugly movie, poorly blocked, sloppily controlled, with smeary cheap-looking digital photography. There’s personality here, but so boringly developed and haphazardly deployed it very quickly lost my patience. 

Ill Communication: ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Like its main character, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has a big heart hidden under a surface of affectations. When the film, yet another fussily stylized coming-of-age Sundance winner, began, I was worried it was primed to get on my nerves. It charges out of the gate with self-consciously flippant narration wrapped around a teenage boy’s college application letter. Thomas Mann is the boy, Greg, the “Me” of the title. He opens the film delivering verbose voice over in a mopey monologue breaking down the social groups of his quirky high school over a montage of precisely framed tableaus. This set off all the twee faux-indie navel gazing alarm bells in my head. But then a funny thing happened. The movie settled into its rhythms, allowing its characters space to breathe and its style room to reflect an evocative teenage mood. By the end, it had worn down my defenses and moved me.

In the opening, Greg explains his plan to stay invisible during high school, friendly enough to avoid getting picked on, but distant enough to avoid close associations with any one group. He acts like he’s uninterested in making meaningful human connections, but really he’s just scared of getting hurt. Better to have no real friends than risk losing them. Instead, Greg spends his time enjoying culture, his sociology professor father (Nick Offerman) and mother (Connie Britton) having encouraged his serious-minded eclectic exploration of everything from food to literature. But film is his favorite, marching through the Criterion Collection canon and making his own little parodies (with titles like My Dinner with Andre the Giant) in his spare time. It’s not long before this movie’s arch stylization is put to good use reflecting Greg’s worldview. It knows it’s a movie as much as he wishes his life could be understood that way.

His closest acquaintance is a fellow cinephile, Earl (RJ Cyler), who likes the same movies and collaborates on the parodies. They hang out every day and have fun together, but they’re not friends, exactly. Greg calls him his co-worker, but we, and Earl, know better. Over the course of the film, Greg slowly lets down his emotional barriers as he allows himself to step out of the constricting comfort zone he’s built. The first step is a shove. A classmate, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), has been diagnosed with leukemia and Greg’s mother forces him to go over to her house. Despite neither teen feeling especially thrilled about this diagnosis-inspired play date, an embarrassed friendship forms, dropping the embarrassment as they begin to feel comfortable around each other. But Greg remains painfully socially awkward, as the movie thankfully doesn’t become glossy teen romance. It remains realistic about how much we could expect a person so stubborn could change in a relatively short period of time.

Because Rachel’s the “Dying Girl,” we have a good idea about where this is going. But she’s not completely reduced to her condition or used exclusively as a prop for other’s emotional growth. Though she is that, too. Greg and his outlook remains the focus, the characters turning around him vaguely defined, outside his immediate interest. But as he gets to know them, they come into focus, relationships developing in a sweetly fumbling way. The supporting ensemble capably fleshes out what could otherwise be stock eccentric types. Jesse Andrews’ screenplay, based on his novel of the same name, has familiar teen comedy elements (wacky mom (Molly Shannon), wise cool teacher (Jon Bernthal), hellish cafeteria, set cliques, accidental drug use). It’s self-aware and loaded with artifice (split-screens, title cards, winking narration, precisely dropped soundtrack cues), but also totally sincere in its evocation of a pinched emotional perspective. Greg feels things so deeply he holds himself back, preferring movies to the real world because it’s a channeling of emotion. (How many film fans can relate?) Human connection isn’t so easily contained.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who has mostly directed TV episodes for Ryan Murphy’s Glee and American Horror Story, is no stranger to letting loose with all manner of wild emotions and attention-grabbing style. Here he deploys an extravagantly directed showiness with long unbroken takes, tight framing to emphasize strong feeling, dramatic focus pulls, cutaways to animations and flashbacks, blocking to enhance emotional distance by pushing characters to the extreme sides of a wide scope frame. But it’s in service of a delicate tone, matching the wild imagination and moody inner life of its main character. As he grows closer to the Dying Girl, and realizes how important his friendship with Earl really is, the film draws them closer in the frame. Soon he’s no longer sharing the shot, but sharing the space. The dramatic style settles down, decreasing its posturing as Greg does.

Its climactic moment – you can probably guess the broad strokes – is its most beautiful, a scene of pure earnest connection mediated, but not superseded, by cinema. The camera focuses on Cooke’s eyes, wet and trembling, the light from a projector dancing colors across her face as their connection reaches its purest expression. But this moment doesn’t solve Greg’s problems, spiking a potentially sentimental moment with a more realistic picture of the emotions and situations involved. Greg gains confidence in risking connection despite possible pain. There’s enough reflection in this end to prevent the film from becoming only blinkered approval of his initial attitudes. So even though the other characters only exist here to put the protagonist on the path out of adolescent selfishness, they remain individuals. He learns to see other people as continually unfolding surprises, with more to learn the more you stick around and get to know them. Films can be like that, too. Sometimes if you take a chance, let your guard down, you can be rewarded with meaningful, maybe painful, connection.

Family Tries: THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

A family gathers in the shadow of their patriarch’s death, four grown children living under one upstate New York roof for one week at the behest of their mourning mother. “You can cry. You can laugh. There’s no right way to grieve,” the mom (played by Jane Fonda, carrying more dignity than the plot allows) says early in This is Where I Leave You, a movie that wants you to do a little laughing and a little crying. It’s a fairly contained and awfully schmaltzy comedy-tinged drama, completely predictable in the beats that it hits. Uptight jerks learn to loosen up. Irresponsible cads mature a bit. Generational gaps are bridged, but slightly. The grown kids have a prickly, but deep down loving, reunion that involves old grievances, new secrets, and a reason to rethink their lives’ trajectories. The film’s heart is in the right place.

The ensemble is filled with welcome faces, each an interesting presence in their own right. There’s Jason Bateman as the middle son, a man who loses his job and his wife on the same afternoon and arrives for the funeral convinced he won’t share his bad news. Of course that doesn’t happen. It’s a secret-spilling free-for-all. His sister (Tina Fey) is in a marriage in the process of chilling, so much so that her husband only lingers around two or three scenes, a total non-issue the rest of the time. She has an adorable kid or two, so that’s nice, except for the scene involving potty training gone wrong. That’s gross. Also back to sit shiva is their older brother (Corey Stoll). His wife (Kathryn Hahn) wants to get pregnant, a goal that drives her a little crazy in a condescending way. There’s also a younger brother (Adam Driver) and his cougar girlfriend (Connie Britton). Talk about a full house.

The ensemble is strong, if unevenly deployed in thin subplots. Bateman and Fey have good rapport, with similar clenched braininess that feels warmly familial. Stoll gets lost in the shuffle, but is a steady, mildly neurotic, rock, and Driver seems incapable of an uninteresting line reading. Mother Fonda gets lost in the sea of subplots for most of the film, drifting through as only a punchline for her oversharing and her boob job. She deserves better. They all do, really. Jonathan Tropper’s screenplay (based on his own novel) gives each family member their own little undercooked plots, complete with their own, largely separate, set of supporting characters (Rose Byrne, Ben Schwartz, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard). None of them are all that interesting on their own, but collectively, it adds up to a passable amalgam of middle-aged concerns and family tensions.

Director Shawn Levy is an effective manipulator, able to execute material efficiently and professionally. I liked his robo-boxing movie Real Steel, and found small charms in his Cheaper by the Dozen remake, one-crazy-night comedy Date Night, and unfairly maligned flop The Internship. Those aren’t great movies, but at least they hit some good notes. With This is Where I Leave You, though, despite all the soft lighting, on-the-nose pop song choices, and sunny greeting-card encouragements, the movie never quiet achieves emotional lift it seeks.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a Robert Altman type would’ve done with this material, and not just because the family’s last name is Altman. With such a large, talented ensemble in a small location, a balanced approach with overlapping dialogue and thematic concerns might’ve worked better. Though certainly non-Altman family reunion films like August: Osage County and Dan in Real Life manage to hit similar notes with greater aplomb that Levy and Tropper’s work here. It’s bland and comfortable, but never really comes alive in any way. Still, for a superficial, sentimental, predictable little middle-of-the-road thing, it could be worse. 

Checked Off: THE TO DO LIST

I appreciate the effort to tell a casually randy teen comedy from the perspective of a young woman, make the film explicitly about labels and expectations that go along with being a woman, and end with the girl taking control of her body and coming out on top. I would’ve appreciated all that a whole lot more if Maggie Carey’s The To Do List managed to be funny while it was at it. Instead of another Bridesmaids, Easy A, or The Heat, the kind of funny female-driven comedy that leads for a round of patronizing women-can-be-funny-too surprise from certain predictable corners of the media landscape, this underachieving movie has a killer (and sadly underrepresented) hook in its point of view without the goods to back it up. It’s not an occasion to say, “women can star in a comedy, too,” but rather “women can star in a bad comedy, too.”

The movie’s essentially a loose collection of thin bits about a high school valedictorian (Aubrey Plaza) looking to spend her summer before college shaking her good girl image. Being a bookish, studious, conscientious young lady, she makes a checklist of acts to do in just a few months. Her attempts, cringingly awkward and gross, fall between gossip sessions with friends and shifts at the community pool. The success of the film hinges upon how funny a viewer finds these episodic sketches, which are light and forgettable, trending towards gross-out gags that are either too much or not enough. (One in particular, a riff on a similar gag in Caddyshack, is disastrously gross.) At most, I felt a desire to laugh without ever actually laughing. Nothing goes wrong enough to complain, but nothing goes right enough to entertain. It's a movie of good intentions and weak execution. It’s set in 1993, for example, but that idea never goes further than lots of great 90’s hits on the soundtrack and the wardrobe department dressing everyone in the most unflattering fashions of the era.

Similarly, the cast is underutilized. Plaza has a sardonic low-key approach that's an awkward fit with the anxiety and naivety in her character as written. She's a real talent - good on Parks & Rec and with great voice work in Monsters University and the English dub of From Up On Poppy Hill - but this movie doesn't play to her strengths. She's better than the material. That goes for the supporting cast around her as well. They’re all appealing performers – Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele as the best friends, Rachel Bilson, as the vapid older sister, Connie Britton as the open-minded mom, Clark Gregg as the uptight dad, Bill Hader as the slacker pool manager – but even they don’t have more than a small moment or two to shine. As the guys the lead crushes on or who have crushes on her, Scott Porter and Johnny Simmons are appealing and underwritten, which is partly a good joke on how these roles are typically portrayed when a young man's in the lead and those roles are filled by young women. One’s a hot but dull blonde; the other’s a cute brunette who's taken for granted, but all around better for her. Sound familiar?

While watching the film, I intellectualized the novelty (importance, even) of the point of view and some of it was technically funny, but I just wasn’t entertained. Even the best moment would be the weakest in a better comedy. It's not bad, just, despite its raunch and purposeful button-pushing, weirdly sloppy and mild. A tepid milestone, it’s a film that says girls deserve crummy teen sex comedies too. True, but that doesn’t mean the results are any worthier than crummy teen sex comedies from a guy’s point of view.