The White Lotus 2 review: The art of comic dysfunctionality

'The White Lotus' writer-director Mike White and Jennifer Coolidge (above) have been industry pals for several years, and White wrote the part of Tanya keeping only Coolidge in mind.

The only actor to return to Season 2 of the hit HBO series The White Lotus is 61-year-old American actor Jennifer Coolidge. Her role is that of Tanya McQuoid, a spacey woman with a singular brand of skewed wit. In Season 1, the series, written and directed by Mike White, was set in Hawaii. Tanya, in her middle ages, checked in to the eponymous luxury resort with a pot full of her mother’s ashes. Tanya, a childlike, zany heiress would shroud deep wounds with bad behaviour and a big appetite. On that trip, she met a terminally ill man named Greg (Jon Gries)—they fell in love.

On Season 2, Gries has a brief appearance as Tanya’s husband—did the wealthy wife have something to do with his new energy and good health?—until Episode 4 (the series is streaming on Disney + Hotstar, an episode every Monday morning). The couple checks into The White Lotus, this time in gorgeous Sicily with incandescent natural-looking light filtering in. If not for Coolidge, watch The White Lotus for the Sicilian natural light and the cobalt blue seas. The guests in this season are far more wicked, extravagant and unabashedly pleasure-seeking; the staff members are far less transparent. White is much more in control of his material—delivering a season that tops Season 1 by a wide margin. After the show’s success in last year’s Emmy Awards—with Coolidge winning Best Supporting Actress for her role as Tanya McQuoid—it promises to be a multiple-season show with a new location every new season.

Jennifer Coolidge in season 2

Coolidge’s award comes at the peak of her acting career. Having done several comic roles in films including that of Paulette, with Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, an outré mom in American Pie and as a distressed, comical wife in Best in Show (She also famously appeared in the Ariana Grande music video Thank U, Next), among several other roles, she is having the moment that seems to finally channel the persona she has cultivated over decades.

She has discussed her long struggle to make it in Hollywood in interviews, having lost roles in hundreds of auditions over nearly a decade. Now, Coolidge not only has roles written keeping her in mind, like in the recent Netflix series The Watcher, she masterfully owns the moments that define her roles. In The Watcher, she plays a chirpy but blunt real estate dealer who has dialogues like this: “We’re not ready yet,” she tells a server at a local country club, “and my napkin smells like vinegar”. As in all her recent roles, Coolidge relishes leaning into her characters’ excessiveness and kooky beats with a wink and a smirk.

In the beginning of Season 2, Tanya almost seems to have adopted a la dolce vita approach to her Sicilian getaway—we see her woefully persuading Greg to take her on a ride on an Italian vespa, a romantic dream Tanya has always nurtured. But all goes downhill when Greg leaves. Her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) stays behind, “babysitting” her boss and sulkily choosing not to disagree with Tanya’s truisms such as this: “If you’re looking for a friend, gay guys are really the best. Because let’s face it, women are kind of depressing. Most women are drips. But it’s not their fault. They have a lot to be depressed about.” Portia smiles, stupefied, and nods. White and Coolidge have been industry pals for several years, and White wrote this part keeping only Coolidge in mind. During Season 2 pre-release publicity, White has said, “She improvs much more than the other actors. I tend to just shoot what I wrote, but her ideas are genius, bizarro stuff. She’s dialled in.”

At 61, Coolidge’s rise as an actor at ease and resplendent in playing middle-aged women with quirks and neurosis represents much that is alright with Hollywood. Comic dysfunctionality, by which I mean characters who are dysfunctional in serious ways but who process that unevenness with deadpan humour and wit, and who is willing to laugh at and with the characters they play is no less an artform than method acting—the other practitioners are largely male; James Franco and Robert Downey Jr come to mind.

In Season 2, a motley group of European gay men seek out Tanya and they strike a hedonistic friendship leading to the decadent, inherited estate of one of the men with whom Tanya finally seems to be able to be herself. The gay vacation friend’s name is Quentin (Tom Hollander), a British expat who admits to being distracted a lot: “I’m a big advocate if distraction. My whole life has been one long distraction.” Tanya and he take in the minute, vintage beauties of his estate at Palermo and agree over chinking champagne flutes, “I live for beauty.” Pathos and batshit humour overlap in this scene with terrific moody effect.

Coolidge next appears in Shotgun Wedding, a January theatrical release with Jennifer Lopez in the lead. Lopez is the bride and Coolidge is the groom’s mom. She discovers the bride-to-be in a crop top with her son, the Lopez midriff a steely washboard like never before. “Is that genetics, or is that, like, pilates?” And she winks slowly, in her signature way. Coolidge has a way of using her small eyes and lips. Her best moments on screen are often without dialogues. In silence, she looks out, away, and pauses or puckers her lips before uttering maybe one line. The way she says, “I live for beauty.”