There is an accentuated element of guilty pleasure in imbibing the hedonistic energy of The White Lotus, a series so inured in purposeless affluence, we feel at times like tourists in a timeless zone, lounging, sighing, gawking and occasionally sulking. The strands in the plot are slender yet sturdy.
The characters are on vacation. The screenwriters are not. Some of the goings-on in Thailand (yes, that’s where the loaded vacationers are this time) are so involving we feel we are invested in the characters way beyond what they deserve.
I was especially hooked to the unfailingly excellent Jason Isaacs (who looks like an older, wiser Rajat Kapoor), who plays an investor, Timothy Ratliff, on holiday with his wife and three grownup children. Timothy is informed he has lost all his money. He must pretend all is well so as to not spoil his family’s vacation.
The tension here is tangible. So, too, is when the island’s squeaky-clean security guard, Gaiyok (Tayme Thapthimthong), loses his gun while having some romantic fun on the side.
Both the tense characters, I felt, deserved a spin of their own. This, in a way, is a comment on the compact and clenched writing. The mood on the surface is…sun, sea and fun. But the fissures and fractures beneath will hit you just when you least expect them to.
More than Seasons 1 and 2, Season 3 rounds off the characters more pronouncedly, gives them contours, and imbues their lives with a lingering locus standi (so to speak). I came away with many characters playing in my head. Chelsea, played by the toothy Aimee Lou Wood, brings a bite to her character. She has a fabulous graph: she is first perceived as a gold digger and then as a caring, loving companion to a very troubled man.
A lot of the goings-on seems plainly a pleasure pursuit. The endless partying, the music sessions, the singing, and the bingeing are woven into the dramatic core… not as seamlessly as expected. But there is an element of playful gravitas in the goings on, a kind of rushed rumination that gives the characters an edge above their hedonism.
A lot of the lighthearted banter secretes a bedrock of sombre meditation. In one of the best-written monologues of the series, Sam Rockwell gives a splendidly straightfaced performance as a pleasure-seeker who ends up being the pleasure zone himself. It is a moment of reckoning where the theme of vacationing blends into the larger question of how far one can go in pursuit of pleasures, how much can one party before becoming the party oneself.
The unique blend of levity and contemplation brings an attractive residual of durability to what would otherwise be a series about a bunch of drunken pleasure seekers making a fool of themselves.
