The Dangerous Naïveté of <em>Coastal Elites</em>

In the film’s view, America is in the throes of a partisan disagreement—a dinner-party conversation gone awry. As political statements go, this one’s not just trite; it’s also glaringly out of step with the national mood. Less than two months away from a potentially catastrophic election, is it really unreasonable for someone like Miriam to be upset by a president who intentionally downplayed the danger of the coronavirus and who won’t commit to accepting defeat if his opponent is voted in? Like many other tone-deaf Trump-era satires, Coastal Elites misdiagnoses the dangers facing the country.

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Coastal Elites’ flaws begin with its uninspired screenplay and blandly written ensemble. In addition to Miriam, the characters represent slices of the political spectrum, but mostly lean left. Mark (Dan Levy) is a gay actor living in West Hollywood, whose fears and frustrations about the state of the world are overshadowed by his career woes. Callie (Issa Rae) is a philanthropist whose familial wealth and prep-school ties to Ivanka Trump endear her to the current administration. Clarissa (Sarah Paulson) is a meditation influencer attempting to film an episode of her YouTube show about not “allowing political trauma to poison your bliss.” Sharynn (Kaitlyn Dever) is the lone counterweight to the liberals’ histrionics, a Wyoming nurse who flew to New York City to volunteer at the height of its medical emergency.  

The heavy-handedness and caricature make more sense when you consider that Coastal Elites was originally envisioned as a theater performance. The playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick first conceived of his story for the Public Theater in New York, where the smash hit Hamilton premiered in 2015. But in its tone, format, and subject matter, the Jay Roach–directed HBO film evokes all the patriotic kumbaya-ism of Lin-Manuel Miranda production with none of the fun or artistic payoff. Coastal Elites enters a radically different political climate, one in which both the optimism of the Barack Obama years and the media’s patronizing post-election attempts to understand the “white working class” feel woefully dated. Political and moral divides have grown more intractable. Exhortations to read Hillbilly Elegy have come and gone. So, too, have many political pundits’ belief that comedy is an effective way of criticizing the Trump administration.

Read: Understanding America’s moral divides

Still, the production history of Coastal Elites sheds light on the film’s intended audience: the Miriams of New York City and its environs, the self-flagellating liberals who might be willing to let a play at the Public Theater lecture them for an hour and a half. Such viewers might even feel a sense of catharsis following the moral flogging. Despite its political shallowness, one can imagine the appeal of watching Coastal Elites in its original setting. Monologues performed for an intimate audience can be electric even when the material itself is banal.

Though the HBO special can now reach viewers around the country, of all political stripes, it still seems to target the same narrow demographic. The film’s five monologues, which feel like a series of high-resolution YouTube clips, are tied together with snippets of the president’s distasteful one-liners (including the infamous line from the Access Hollywood tape). No Trump-supporting, independent, or conservative-leaning characters appear except as foils to help illustrate the narrow-mindedness of the main subjects. Clarissa, for example, questions her contempt for her MAGA-hat-wearing relatives after her conservative father admits that he was offended by the president’s comments about Senator John McCain. With these kinds of simplistic anecdotes, Coastal Elites undercuts its own attempts to humanize the people that so-called elites disdain.