"Maniac" owes its nihilistic, visionary chops to a far-reaching smorgasbord of cinematic influences (some good, some bad), guilefully pin-balling across its 10-episode arc with gusto and fearlessness. Director and co-creator Cary Joji Fukunaga eschews emotional weight in favor of a techno-spiritual carnal evangelism, wherein the show’s dreary extrapolation of a not-too-distant future reveals a reluctance to confront our society’s worst self-inflicted traumas. A foreboding, narcissistic malaise brought about by foul-mouthed robot koalas and cuddly sanitation droids, “Maniac” proves that just the right amount of illusion and self-deception can save any aimless dramedy from its worst impulses. Jonah Hill’s Owen suffers from bouts of schizophrenia, while his non-love love interest, Annie (Emma Stone) is plagued by a borderline personality diagnosis — making them the perfect subjects for an invasive three-pronged clinical trial, one which delves deeper than anyone would dare to endure. If this sounds familiar, it’s because “Maniac” borrows heavily from the work of Kathryn Bigelow (“Strange Days”), Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich”), Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and the Wachowski Brothers (“The Matrix 1 ,2 ,3”). It also pilfers techniques from “Rashomon” and “Run Lola Run,” interjecting Tarantinoesque non-linear story techniques while completely ripping off the retro-future aesthetic designs of the “Alien” franchise.
In choosing the Netflix limited series as her follow-up to “Battle of the Sexes,” Stone admitted it was her character’s non-romantic alliance with Owen that compelled her to accept the role of Annie, citing "I’ve never seen a show with 10 full episodes, a whole season, where a female character doesn’t have a love interest.” Indeed, Stone’s elevated role as the tortured protagonist, rather than femme fatale or supporting ingenue, is precisely what makes the show so energizing. Strengthened by abandoning the clichéd boy-meets-girl narrative, writer and co-creator Patrick Somerville concocts a deeper portrayal of sisterhood, satirizes toxic male rage, and presents an irreverent maternal ardency never before seen on film. It also complements today's irksome headlines, which have seen Psychology Professor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifying before congress about one of the worst experiences in her life — and possibly ruining the rest of it as a result. Physical and mental injuries, especially how they relate to memory and well-being, remains the most undeterminable frontier of the human condition. We may be obliged by well-meaning health care professionals into resisting the urge to suppress these memories and emotions, but excavating them is by no means an easier endeavor. “Indelible in the hippocampus,” as Dr. Ford describes, “is the laughter.”
Fukunaga and Somerville understand these crucial tenets, and play their cards remarkably well — invoking some earnestly-crafted sequences of self-deprecating humor which bolsters the series' sluggish midpoints. A roughshod lemur heist and accidental alien homicide are also among the show's bright spots, though it is the great G.R.T.E. (a.k.a. “Gertie") which proves to be its most auspicious secret weapon. An artificially intelligent, semi sentient, super-computer modeled after HAL 9000 and Dr. Mantleray's mother (played by Sally Field with unexpected comedic reverie) — “Gertie” is a lonely, ill-tempered abacus of a machine made of zeros and ones, deeply unmoored by the nightmares she’s programmed to rectify, and yet powerless to emend. Her pain quickly manifests from chaos into bloodlust, proving she may be the actual “Maniac” of the bunch, as she’s forced to recalibrate strangers’ consciousnesses from - to +. The evolving worlds of psychology, tech, and pharmaceutical medicine have striven to make these alterations in humans infinite and everlasting, yet we are also the saddest we've been in years, and the only real true liberation from self-hatred and revulsion is the power within us to start over, perhaps by making a new friend, and not being so damn hard on ourselves all the time. Without giving too much of the ending away, it’s safe to say both Hill and Stone's climactic escape mirrors that of the "The Graduate," and their inability to face reality might be their eventual undoing, but the fiction which remains in their heads may also prove to be that which carries them wherever they ought to be or go. Do we even matter? We’ll never really know for sure, or opine about such questions, if we refuse to acknowledge that we matter to ourselves.
"MANIAC" a.k.a. “Enter the Neuro-matrix” on NETFLIX. Rated TV-MA.
