Cary Fukunaga's 'Maniac' Is An Absurdist 'Inception' Meets 'Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind' [Review]

What if I told you someone tried to bridge the gap between the bizarre world of Charlie Kaufman and the fantastic dimensions of Christopher Nolan? And then what if I also told you, a first-rate auteur who still has yet to peak, was behind it all with two top-shelf stars in tow? In theory, the idea of “True Detective” and soon-to-be “Bond 25,” filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga creating an absurdist, surrealist version of “Inception,” meets “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind“— only, instead of dreams and erasure, using mental illness, depression and schizophrenia as a vehicle for exploring memories, fantasy, guilt and regret —sounds mind-blowingly interstellar. In reality, however, or what passes as reality in this hyper-idiosyncratic laboratory anyhow, “Maniac,” Fukunaga’s new limited series for Netflix written by novelist Patrick Somerville, but based on a wacky Norwegian series of the same name, is unwieldy, messy and zany. Understandably off-kilter, given that it lives in the illusory crawlspace between imagination and delusion, but chaotic and dense Pharma Satirical-Fiction, nevertheless. “Maniac” is a pill that’s difficult to swallow with adverse narrative side effects.

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A bizarre, psychotropic comedy cum fantasy thriller cum romance, about lost souls who find each other, “Maniac” is as exhausting as it is ambitious. Set in an intentionally undefinable retro/futurist world— ’80s Apple computer tech aesthetics meets lo-fi space-age technology, mashed with Art Deco design — Jonah Hill plays the anxious Owen Milgrim, the disaffected, young scion of a wealthy family (led by patriarch Gabriel Byrne) who suffers from schizophrenia. Exacerbating his alienation, Owen’s family is asking him to lie on behalf of his older brother (Billy Magnussen), an alpha male douchebag on trial for some abusive #MeToo-worthy transgressions.

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Overwhelmed by the pressures of his shallow, shameless family, more interested in protecting a legacy than truth, Owen retreats to the radical clinical trials of Neverdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech’s new drug that can “repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak.” There, with 10 other patients undergoing these experiments, he meets and makes a mysterious, unexplainable cosmic connection with another patient, Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone), a depressed young woman who has an unhealthy fixation on the broken relationship with her estranged mother and sister (played by Julia Garner).

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Neverdine Pharmaceutical is run by several kooks in bad wigs, many of them unfortunately stereotyped Japanese scientist with cartoonishly thick accents including Dr. Fujita (Sonoya Mizuno), Dr. Muramoto (Rome Kanda) and Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux). Meanwhile, in the delusional headspace of Owen, his brother—or some imaginary sidekick version of his brother—is guiding him on some conspiratorial mission. It’s Owen’s job, and Annie may eventually help, to save the world. Or maybe they’ll just save each other.

Of course, these pharmaceutical trials go awry, and Mantleray is left to pick up the pieces. The red pill or the blue pill—actually it’s A, B and C here—transport the characters into the recesses of their mind where unrealities fold into themselves and the simulations go off the charts. The HAL-like supercomputer GRTA (“Greta”), gets an unexpected dose of empathy and goes haywire, and eventually, it’s left to Mantleray’s estranged mom and famous pop-therapist, Dr. Greta Mantleray (Sally Field), to come clean up her son’s mess.

These perilous mind games make for a brain-farting world of genre-hopping in each episode. One mindjump—or whatever these dreamscape haulages are— transports Annie, eternally seeking to reconnect with her sister, and her sibling into a “Lord Of The Rings“-like realm where they turn up as elves. But mostly, it’s Owen, diving into his consciousness and unexpectedly finding Annie inexplicably sharing the same, conjoined cognitive illusion. In one episode, they’re in some elegant, mystery-art thriller, another, New Jersey trailer trash trying to save a stolen Lemur; an extra tangent with Owen as a gangbanging cholo. Then there’s an international spy thriller set in Iceland (the funniest, best sequences by far with a terrifically choreographed action sequence) and all of it with low-tech sci-fi tinges (an early episode even seems to have a kind of 8-bit nod to the creation scene in Terrence Malick‘s “The Tree Of Life“).

Yet, if it all sounds like way too much to process, overloaded MRI synapses firing too fast, that’s because it most certainly is. And tonally, the overwrought show veers all over the place for several reasons beyond its self-aware genre hopscotch. For one, no one seems to be starring in the same show. Theroux appears as if he’s received the script to a second-rate Charlie Kaufman movie (like “Cold Souls“) by way of something silly like the reality-challenged “Wilfred.”

Meanwhile, Hill is in full-on sad bastard Jim Carrey mode from ‘Eternal Sunshine,’ joylessly delivering mumbled lines and taking the “heavily-medicated” part of this character far too literally (“My mind, it doesn’t work right,” he says with a touch of self-pity). The always charming Emma Stone, of course, is right in the middle and seems to be the only one to successfully navigate the show’s wildly disparate, inconsistent tenors of drama, and what appears to be the show’s flimsy excuse to play tourist within genre (and any time she needs to be emotional, oh boy, does she nail it).

Truthfully, “Maniac” rallies pretty hard in the home stretch, and its brain-twisting perceptions start to finally come into focus in a daring and delightful package worthy of the heady filmmakers the show invokes. Yet the cohesion of its brain-twisty ideas arrives far too late (not for nothing it’s also a dark comedy where the laughs are far too few and between). Worse, along the journey, when the viewer has absolutely no clue what’s going on, “Maniac” is often an insufferable chore and WTF confusing.

Conversely, there’s a cleverness to “Maniac” for sure (some amusing sight gags too for those paying attention), but the series cannot sustain its lofty ambitions. 10 episodes long, there’s too much fat and it asks way too much from the viewer. “Maniac” suffers from some “Westworld“-y symptoms—the tedium and tuning-out that develops when you’ve kept your audience in the dark and too perplexed for too long.

Like all good narratives about wistful dreams, unattainable desires and the spiritually crushing weight of existence, “Maniac,” for all its hysterical blindness, is about trying to both escape traumas and connect and reconcile what we can in this increasingly distorted and senseless modern world. To that end, an aspirational “Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” bittersweetness reveals itself late in “Maniac.” It’s a little best-day-of-my-life hokey, and yet, it kind of works. But this late stage treatment for existential sadness is just not the cure or easy fix it wants to be. [C]