It’s been long enough since Charlie Kaufman first cracked open his brain and let his weird/wistful visions come pouring out onto movie screens that we can now really see his influence. There were, of course, the early pale imitators, Lars and his real girl flickering wanly and then vanishing into some forgotten place. But now, nearly 20 years since Being John Malkovich, there’s been some actual absorption and processing of his work, its mix of chilly quirk and deep, idiosyncratic pathos. And some worthy descendants have been born of it.
Patrick Somerville’s new Netflix series, Maniac, is one of those children. A melancholy adventure into the mind, the series also owes a debt to Philip K. Dick, Terry Gilliam, and myriad other makers of cherished oddball ephemera from the last 30-plus years. But it somehow only rarely feels like tired pastiche. With the invaluable help of director Cary Joji Fukunaga, Somerville finds a rich emotional timbre to underscore and complement the wacky, arch-conceptual science-fiction.
In an alternate-timeline (or maybe dimension) New York City, two lonely people, both in states of mental and material disarray, embark on a drug trial that forces them to confront past tragedies and crises. They’re played by Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, the latest movie star–types to emigrate to the small screen in search of interesting work. Their casting is a kind of nostalgic joke, as they were paired together in their mutual breakout film, 2007’s bawdy comedy Superbad. Now, wizened by years and laden with grown-up accolades, they employ their innate chemistry toward more serious ends, with often stirring results.
Most of those affecting moments come from Stone, who plays Annie, a grieving mess addicted to a pill that offers her consuming moments of release. Explaining what, exactly, the pill does to her would be a bit of a spoiler, but it’s powerful enough that she cruelly manipulates her way into the drug trial that will provide her more of it. Annie is an interestingly shaded character; Somerville gives her a specific edge, a detailed catalogue of hurt and anger, which Stone teases out and explores with dexterous insight.
Given the episodic, show-within-a-show (or at least dream-within-a-show) construction of the series, Stone is also tasked with playing a variety of different characters, from a sassy Long Island nurse to a Lord of the Rings–esque elf. She’s game and elastic throughout, bringing palpable reality to each trope-y sketch, while maintaining a thorough command of Annie’s larger arc. Stone takes a heck of a trip through Maniac’s 10 episodes, reminding us of both the range and acuity of her skill.
As Owen, a loner sad sack who’s been (maybe falsely?) diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Hill takes a muted tack familiar to anyone who’s seen Adam Sandler in his most downbeat roles. This approach works some of the time, especially when Hill has Stone’s vibrant energy reflecting off of him. But at other points it feels like a frustrating bit of non-acting, suited neither to Maniac’s antic humor nor its surprisingly delicate swells of sentiment.
At first it seems that Maniac is slanted in Owen’s direction, told primarily through his perspective—yet another story in which a woman is merely the key to unlocking something in a man, or the talisman that wards off his worst impulses. But as Maniac unfolds, it becomes pretty equitable, with both Owen and Annie working through their own private storms, struggling toward a better place that might lie past the valley of despair.
Maniac is a show about confronting psychic pain in a broad sense, and yet I admire how closely it sticks to Owen and Annie’s particular pathologies. It’s a disarmingly personal kind of inquiry, recognizing that our individual losses and fears may seem rather inconsequential from a distance, but that inside us they loom with the weight of the epic. In dialing in on its particular sadness, Maniac emits an expansive empathy. It’s a rueful, haunted show, but a comforting one too.
Surrounding Owen and Annie are other test subjects, and, of course, the testers. Chief among the lab-coat set are Sonoya Mizuno as Dr. Fujita and Justin Theroux as James Mantleray, Fujita’s erstwhile partner in love and work who’s brought back to fix a problem afflicting the experiment’s sentient computer. Here is where Maniac finds a lot of its sharpest comedy, but with a true poignancy hiding behind the mad-scientist stuff.
Mantleray’s goal is, ultimately, a generous one. He wants to cure people of their trauma, saving them years of therapy or self-medication or worse. But of course the madness is in the idea that healing could ever be so simple, so reducible to an entity that you can sooth and solidify and pluck out. Maniac does end on a note more hopeful than the series’s fraught beginnings, but it’s not naïve about the lingering and chronic nature of mental unrest. Its characters wind up with an understanding, not a cleansing.
I’m maybe making this all sound pretty heavy. Maniac is also fun! Each trip that Owen and Annie take into their minds is its own little adventure—some more successfully staged than others (a particular swerve into action-comedy toward the end really doesn’t work), but all humming with compelling ideas. They’re well-populated too, with notable standouts like Billy Magnussen as variations of Owen’s scumbag brother and Sally Field as an imperious celebrity pop-psychologist. Some may find the almost aggressive quirk of Somerville’s world a bit exhausting, but I never got tired of its many nuances. Not even the retro-looking technology capable of futuristic things, a stylistic device we’ve seen a lot of since Lost first took us down the hatch.
The show looks great, too. Fukunaga deftly balances the surreal with the tangible, wrangling a kind of controlled chaos out of Somerville’s hectic imaginations. Given the material and the ornateness of its design, Maniac could easily have been overbearingly whimsical, cloying in its Wes Anderson-does-Coen brothers-doing-Kubrick ambition. But I think Fukunaga keeps things just on the right side of modesty. I have a low tolerance for this kind of auteur-aping, but Maniac never set off the full alarm bell—a testament to its clever design, and to the humanity its cast brings to the fore. Or, I don’t know; maybe it just works because of Dan Romer’s lilting, soaring, evocative score. I’m a sucker for one of those.
Maniac already has its reasoned critics. But as someone who’s wrestled with his own mental anguish and bouts of grief (I mean, haven’t we all?), Somerville’s series—or at least Stone’s half of it—proved pretty nourishing. It’s purposeful high-style, a genuine emotional inspection packaged in the trappings of indie sci-fi. I know the show sounds a little annoying on paper, and it had all the potential to be. But at the core of Maniac’s mannered jumble is something real—messy and vital as a heart.
