The Raw Triumph of Jennifer Coolidge in “The White Lotus”

In one of the final scenes of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s HBO series about wealthy white travellers’ disastrous stay at a five-star Hawaiian resort built on ancestral indigenous land, the fragile, middle-aged lush Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) trots toward the ocean carrying a silver box. It is a cream-colored early morning on the island, the beginning of Tanya’s last day at the hotel, and she is ending her vacation a changed woman—at least in her own mind. She arrived at the White Lotus an open wound in designer caftans, a chronic loner with a stiff neck, a dependence on stiff drinks, and corrosive mommy issues that her extravagant riches could not compensate for. She is leaving the resort with a new boyfriend named Greg, a crinkle-eyed stringbean who may or may not have a terminal illness, but who refused to walk out of her suite even after she had a full-on bananas meltdown (open-mouth crying, calling herself a “dead end,” demanding that Greg save himself from the maw of her neediness). Tanya came to Hawaii to scatter her abusive mother’s ashes—the contents of the silver box—but could not bear to do so, even after chartering a boat for a disastrous impromptu ceremony. But here, on this final morning, wearing a billowy white cover-up that likely cost more than a hotel maid’s monthly pay, she is finally ready to let go. Sure, along the way she manipulated and then shattered the hopes of the resort’s gentle spa manager Belinda (an excellent Natasha Rothwell), who thought she’d found a benefactress to fund her vision for a women’s wellness center—but it was all part of Tanya’s path to self-actualization. She tosses the ashes into the surf with the glee of a little girl making a mess of craft-store glitter.

This moment of catharsis could easily have come off as grating—the predictable endnote of a hackneyed self-help parody or a contrived character arc. But in the form of Tanya, as devised by White and embodied by Coolidge, it is the satisfying, if maddening, finale to one of the great TV performances of recent memory, and almost certainly the greatest of Coolidge’s career. White has not been shy about the fact that Jennifer Coolidge was a muse for “The White Lotus.” He had previously written a series specifically for her, about a delusional actress, but HBO declined to make it. “Honestly, it’s the best thing I’ve ever written,” White told E. Alex Jung, of New York. “If someone made this show, it would blow people’s minds. Just think of Jennifer getting bitten by a snake in the Indian Ocean and running for her life.” “The White Lotus”—which he conceived last year as a kind of grandiose tropical bottle episode that could be made within pandemic constraints—provided a fresh chance to write something for Coolidge, a character that highlighted her range.

For most of her career, Coolidge has specialized in broad, schmaltzy character roles. Perhaps because of her voluptuous figure, long blonde mane, and flotation-device lips, she has been recruited to play MILFs, gold-diggers, and bimbos to high comedic effect. Take her role as the ditzy nail tech Paulette Bonafonté in “Legally Blonde,” who learns how to “bend and snap” as a flirtation technique. Or Sherri Ann Cabot, her airheaded character in “Best in Show,” who married for money but is secretly romping around with her poodle’s butch-lesbian trainer and who spouts strange koans while wearing a baby-pink ski jacket and a ridiculous fur hat. Coolidge is so good at playing dippy that it’s been easy to miss the sadness that imbues much of her work—the dissociative loneliness underneath Sherri Ann’s glassy glaze. With Tanya, White allowed Coolidge to foreground the melancholy, or at least place it in bracing balance with her campier tendencies. She starts out playing Tanya for laughs, but instead of veering into full caricature she brings a shocking poignancy to the character’s most unhinged comedic moments. Just when you think you can dismiss Tanya as a deranged aristocrat with no depth beyond her pockets, she will blurt out the phrase “Oh, mother, mother, mother, mother” in a way that reveals an ocean of suppressed hurt.

But, as White has often shown, personal suffering, and the quest to overcome it, rarely changes the world. Think of Amy Jellicoe, the endlessly frustrating protagonist played by Laura Dern in White’s last HBO show, the short-lived but much beloved “Enlightened.” Amy—a woman who returns from a rehab center, also in Hawaii, with a manic zeal to change her corporate workplace from within—is obnoxious, enraged, optimistic, and ultimately effective. But she only finds enlightenment when she abandons the personal and veers toward the political. No amount of meditation or journaling was going to bring about her transformation. Like Amy, Tanya is an example of White’s talent for writing female characters who are hard to root for but impossible to dismiss. Early in the fifth episode of “The White Lotus,” Tanya sits with Belinda in her hotel room, wearing a black floral robe with marabou cuffs, engaged in an impromptu therapy session. As she recaps the previous night’s date with Greg, she has a faraway look in her eye and a melted, sourpuss frown. “I just know I’m gonna get hurt,” she says. “Maybe he likes you,” Belinda offers, with forced cheeriness. Then Tanya launches into a frantic monologue about the onion-like layers of her personality, moving so quickly over the words that her usual babyish coo sounds a bit like a sputtering lawn mower. “I get all afraid, like, you know, how much do I wanna show him?” she says. “Is he gonna be repulsed? Or is he gonna be alarmed?” And then, taking a breath, she adds, “And at the core of the onion, Belinda, is just a straight-up alcoholic lunatic.” It is a disarmingly truthful statement; despite her vanity and histrionics, Tanya knows herself. Coolidge’s convincing combination of chaotic solipsism and laudable vulnerability leaves the viewer off-kilter.

In “The White Lotus”—which is full of outstanding performances—White shows us many versions of entitlement and few pathways to anything in the way of spiritual growth. Shane (Jake Lacy), the heinously spoiled frat boy, literally gets away with murder—and gets to stay married—after a week of terrorizing the hotel staff. The mother-daughter duo of Nicole and Olivia Mossbacher (Connie Britton and Sydney Sweeney) sashay away from their vacation feeling like victims as a result of a botched hotel robbery when, in fact, their blinkered narcissism has led to the arrest of a local boy whom they will likely never think about again. It is Tanya who seems to have the biggest shift, who can finally loosen herself from the grip of her misery and see her life clearly. But this is White’s final joke. Tanya is the perfect embodiment of false epiphany. Her ecstatic but hollow glow-up makes Coolidge “The White Lotus” ’s main tragedian. (Rothwell, in the role of Belinda, is a close second—see the way Belinda’s face sinks as Tanya tosses a final wad of cash across the spa desk.) The image of Tanya frolicking in the ocean, a free woman whose freedom has come at someone else’s expense, hits the viewer’s eyes like a splash of salt water. Given the triumph of Coolidge’s performance in “The White Lotus”—which has been renewed for a second season, with a new set of characters—one hopes that the execs at HBO might have the good sense to give her and White the chance to make that other show. She’s proven she has the goods. Now let her run from that snake.