Mike White writes people who want to be good and are not much good at it, and he neither lets them off nor sneers at them. On television, where he directs his own scripts, few writers are sharper. In animation for hire, the voice vanishes.
Fi1m perspective
Amy Jellicoe holds the lift doors open with her hands so she can finish shouting at the man who has dropped her. Her mascara has run and half the office is watching. That is the opening of Enlightened (2011), and it is Mike White in one scene: a person behaving appallingly, a camera that will not look away, and no permission to laugh at her without feeling for her too. He does the same with Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya in The White Lotus (2021), whose neediness is funny because it takes up so much room and painful because the unhappiness beneath it is real.
He began in television in the late 1990s, on episodes of Dawson's Creek and Freaks and Geeks, then wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck (2000), an awkward, dark-edged character study that set the pattern. The School of Rock (2003), for Richard Linklater, brought him a much wider audience, and White's screenplay is the least surprising thing in it; Jack Black, with whom he has made three films, supplies the surprise. After Year of the Dog (2007), which he wrote and directed, came Enlightened with Laura Dern, then The White Lotus, where he creates, writes and directs every episode himself.
His best work puts a lot of people in a room they cannot leave, a basement office or a resort, and lets an uncomfortable exchange run long past the point where most writers would cut. In The White Lotus, Heather Persons's editing and Cristóbal Tapia de Veer's score keep that discomfort from ever settling into a holiday. He casts himself well too: his Tyler in Enlightened, pale and wanting nothing, is among the truest acting in it. The kitchen scenes between Dern and Diane Ladd, in which almost nothing is said, moved us more than we expected, because White trusts two women at a table to carry what the dialogue will not. He has said, "Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold." The satire lands because he is in the frame with the guests.
Which is why the studio animation is so dispiriting. Tony Leondis's 2017 film set inside a smartphone, which White wrote with Leondis and Eric Siegel, finds nothing peculiar to emojis in its lesson about fitting in, and Despicable Me 4 (2024), with Ken Daurio, has six ideas the length of a cartoon short and finishes none. Nothing on a smartphone can indict anybody, and without that White is a joke writer for hire. His own work has smaller faults: the first season of The White Lotus gives its guests far more attention than its staff, which matters for a programme about class, and The School of Rock insists on its music as an answer to life for longer than the idea can bear.
Start with Enlightened, two episodes before judging. He has spent several seasons in hotels now. We would like to see him back in a basement.
Biography
Mike White is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born Michael Christopher White on 28 June 1970 in Pasadena, California, he studied at Wesleyan University.
He created, wrote and directed the HBO anthology series The White Lotus (2021–). White wrote the screenplay for the animated film Despicable Me 4 (2024). His other credits include the screenplays for School of Rock (2003), The Good Girl (2002) and Chuck & Buck (2000), and the HBO series Enlightened (2011–2013).
