Stooges bring their disorders to Italy in season 2 of “The White Lotus”

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In an upcoming episode of the new season of the HBO sitcom The White Lotus, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) theorizes that there is nothing attractive left to do in the world. You can move into a great position and take a picture, he says. , however, many others have already taken that photo, and you do it for Instagram content, anyway. “Is it all boring?” She asks.

The season of the White Lotus moment is not boring. Once again, it boasts a perfect cast: Emmy-winning Jennifer Coolidge joins through Aubrey Plaza, Michael Imperioli and F. Murray Abraham, among others, an enchanting landscape and the writer’s acidic spirit. -director Mike White.

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But there are times when it’s hard not to agree with Portia’s broader fear that all this has already been done, and better, the first time.

White created The White Lotus as an anti-pandemic way to resume operations, quarantining his entire cast and crew in the same Hawaiian hotel for production. Originally sold as a limited edition, it has become such a phenomenon that HBO temporarily ordered more, with White moving the action to some other fictional White Lotus station, this one in Taormina, Sicily, and flanking Tanya, incredibly wealthy and indescribably in need of Coolidge, with a new organization of one percent frustrated and frustrating.

Tanya married Greg (Jon Gries), the boy she fell in love with in Hawaii, but also invited the embattled assistant Portia to accompany her to Italy as a kind of emotional dog who can hire her own room service. Meanwhile, Hollywood executive Dom (Imperioli) brought in his father Bert (Abraham) and son Albie (Adam DiMarco) for what was intended to be an exclusive family circle getaway to Bert’s ancestral homeland, if only Dom’s sexual addiction didn’t keep him away from his wife and daughter. A man with enough money Cameron (Theo James) has invited his new rich school roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe) and the wife of Ethan Harper’s hardworking lawyer (Plaza) to sign him and his own wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy) for an awkward holiday couple. And orbiting those 3 teams are the abrasive station director, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), as well as Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), two locals who embark on sex paintings in hopes of achieving bigger dreams.

Although the new season is more than 8,000 miles away from the previous one, Tanya is not the only postponement. White opens things with a flash-forward at the end of the story that promises at least one character will die sooner. End of the week. There’s also the same outdated Love Boat design of 3 teams of visitors covering equipment of other ages (although they have a tendency to be more toxic, like passengers below deck). And if there’s a little less emphasis on This Time, the station staff, Valentina, Portia, Lucia and Mia blend together to create a counterpoint downstairs to the obnoxious life of Cameron and the others upstairs.

There are some key differences. The first is tone. Part of what made Season 1 so special was how White controlled to make the characters feel ridiculous and sad, or horrible and at least understandable, if not likeable. (Think of Sydney Sweeney’s wicked daughter, Olivia, who was transparently the product of her horrible parents. ) Nowhere was this more noticeable than with Tanya, who on the one hand was a transparent user of people, and on the other aspect suffered from a related illness. trauma (the recent death of her mother), and for a time forged a real relationship with the Natasha Rothwell-type spa director, Belinda. This time, Tanya is horrible. She’s still in crisis, as things with Greg are going well, but we have a tendency to see her through the eyes of Portia, who is understandably dissatisfied with being caught under the thumb of this irrational person. (Among other things, when Greg visits Portia on a romantic vacation, Tanya tries to order Portia to stay in her room all week. ) she asks him to do it a lot. But the character is much less complex this time. When he cried and bellowed like a whale last season of mourning for her mother, he was silly and touching; when she cries here, she regularly plays herself just for laughs.

Still, despite Coolidge’s more potent penchant for hilarity, it’s a decidedly less fun season through the five (out of seven) episodes than the reviews that have been given so far. Murray Bartlett’s thinly veiled contempt for Armond through RIP is wonderfully lost this time, though Sabrina Impacciatore has her moments as Armond’s most blatantly hostile Sicilian counterpart. Pig. ) The episodes point to a more extravagant approach, as Lucia and Mia move from guest to guest and room through the game, but the comedy tends to feel sweeter than she wants. The wonderful F. Murray Abraham has a good time as Bert, satisfied with himself, who does not perceive why his son feels so guilty about having adventures, but this story and that of the two couples are sadder than any other.

That said, there are some attractive curtains in both corners of the season. Harper goes out of her way to hide her distaste for other people like Cameron and Daphne, who seem perfectly satisfied in part because they care so little about the global exterior of their little bubble. (They don’t stick to the news and forget Harper’s references to the fragile state of the planet right now. )It’s another wonderful spectacle for Aubrey Plaza, who rose to fame for his deadpan comedy in Parks and Recreation and now has turned out to be an attractive dramatic actor. White also does a wonderful job of peeling the onion from Cameron and Daphne’s relationship, which over time turns out to be much more confusing than Harper realizes. And while Albie dates Portia, we see how other generations in her family circle have other relationships with women. Dom takes Bert’s womanizer to new extremes, while Albie has gone too far in the other direction, getting caught up in the personality of how she thinks a wonderful boy deserves to behave, even if Portia provides transparent signals that she needs something more.

With the pandemic abating, the new season is also more ambitious. Guests leave the hotel frequently. Bert insists on an exit from the organization to stop at the Sicilian segment of The Godfather, while Tanya befriends an organization of gay men, led by Tom Hollander’s funny Quentin, who takes her and Portia to the fabulous Quentin space in Palermo for a few days. Even within the narrow confines of the Hawaiian hotel, White and his artistic team had a genuine ability to contrast the charming surroundings with the ugly habit of others who can stop at them; This facet of the screen feels bigger and even more resilient in this larger setup.

While talking to Albie about what happened to his family, Dom insists, “I can replace. “But The White Lotus has been about other people’s inability to replace, especially when they are so wealthy and so far away that they have no genuine explanation for why to do so. The question is whether watching rich fools ruin the lives of the people around them, while remaining intact through the damage they cause, becomes monotonous season after season, even as locations and (maximum) characters are replaced from year to year. In part, the second season is sharp enough to justify the show’s continuing lifestyle. It’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if White had used the juice of the first season to convince HBO to let him do something as completely new as White Lotus himself felt when he arrived.

The season of The White Lotus will air Oct. 30 on HBO, with episodes airing weekly.

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