One thing that has enabled many people to get through this pandemic — quarantines and government-mandated lockdowns, mass illness, burgeoning infection rates, political fights over whether it is real and/or necessary — is television and the movies. Watching shows and films, whether old or new, has been a reliable means of escape or comfort for many people, helping them get some needed distance from the world's chaos — if only for an hour or two.
However, as a "socially distanced comedy," one of the many issues with HBO's special "Coastal Elites" is that it forces viewers to try to engage humorously with that exact thing — the now — when most of us would literally rather be anywhere else and can't find much to laugh about.
Originally intended to debut on the theater stage — a plan disrupted, like everything else, by COVID-19 — playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick and Emmy Award-winning director Jay Roach teamed up to bring "Coastal Elites" to HBO instead. They pulled in some heavy hitters while doing so — Bette Midler, Issa Rae, Dan Levy, Sarah Paulson and Kaitlyn Dever — as five people trying their best to get through the thick of the pandemic in President Donald Trump's America.
Though politically well-intended, 10 minutes into the movie, it's clear that the story was never supposed to be put on film. The camera Zooms in — literally, the actors speak to the audience via Zoom or some other video calling platform that we’ve been chained to for months — keeping the audience feeling totally restricted when film should expand our world.
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