Manic

In a day when armed guards lurk in our schools and teens get tried and sentenced as adults, the film Manic opens a portal into teen rage, pain, and the existential demands of growing up. The acting, script, and phenomenal cinematography come together to grab the viewer's guts with razor talons—this is an easy movie to avoid, to turn away from, but those who dare to watch it, and to find their own anger and rage challenged, cannot watch it unscathed.

The movie opens with Lyle (3rd Rock's Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays a phenomenal role in this movie), in his late teens, having wounds sutured and his facial bruises attended to. He's anxious to go home with his mom, but two burly psych techs grab him, pump him with a tranquilizer and cart him off to a youth psychiatric unit.

Intense as this may seem, the opening credits disturb the viewer even more intensively. Lyle is in the clinical therapist's office, being interviewed. Between each question, the screen goes black and a set of credits is posted, while the sound of a fight turning into a beating runs in the background.

This sets the stage for a movie that uses digital cinematography, fast cuts, cine verite, and unexpected color to portray the chaotic life of the disturbed. Scene color schemes were actually drawn from several key van Gogh paintings, one of which plays a key role in the movie. Story lines and subplots develop. Lyle's murderous rage surfaces over and over again, challenged, each time, by his therapist. In one particularly charged scene, the therapist smashes a chair during group and asks, "Does that feel better? NO! So now I have to smash something else!" He hurls another chair, "Feel better yet? NO! So now you have to do what we all have to do, you have to live with the feelings!"

Ironically, this movie is more about anger management than the movie, Anger Management. This has all the intensity of a gritty, no-holds-barred war movie. And that's no accident, it's about the war within, the battle between a teen and his pent up rage. Ultimately, it's an existential movie, examining the choice to live or to die, made in the solitude of one's soul. Whatever the situation, whatever our escape plans are ... "wherever we go, there we are." Manic suggests that the only place freedom can be found is locked in engagement with oneself.

Although does go a little "Hollywood" at the end, this is not one of those horrid dramas which suggest that once the hero confronts a key past trauma in a cathartic moment everything turns around. In fact, the therapist, played by Don Cheadle, explicitly denies this: "You may have some epiphanal moment about your father and escape your rage. It's more likely you're going to have it all your life, and have to learn to live your life without destroying yourself or others."

If the movie has a major shortcoming, it is that the psych staff is too helpful. My experience with locked wards finds it highly improbable that Lyle would have been allowed to continue in his room, with his group, after a violent outburst. Most psychiatrists and therapists don't have the courage of Don Cheadle's character, to allow potentially dangerous situations to continue in this litigious day and age. Lyle would have been lugged off to a higher security ward, possibly sedated, and denied the interactions he needed to begin his healing process. But I criticize the mental health system, not the movie, here.

Finally a movie that dares to tell the truth. It never falls into the cliche of trying to be a One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it beats Girl Interrupted and 28 Days in intensity and veracity. Carl Jung wrote "enlightenment consists not in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible." Manic has the courage to show us a piece of that darkness, yet in gazing at it, we find a certain luminosity. In the last analysis we're left with a movie about rage, about having the courage to feel the pain behind the rage, and daring to go on living, finding freedom not by banishing the demons within, but by learning to live with them.

When Manic screened at UCLA, I sat on a panel with an adolescent psychologist, director Jordan Melamed, writer Blayne Weaver and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Although I had already watched the DVD a few days before, the experience of seeing Manic on the big screen totally blew me away. I brought my (then) 15 year-old son with me and he walked out commenting that this was the best movie he'd ever seen. On the panel I fielded a number of questions about anger management--and I had to give the movie two thumbs up for how they handled the subject. Both my son and I found Jordan, Blayne and Joseph to be down-to-earth, gracious, and approachable. This made for one of the biggest "disconnects" in my experience. Joseph/Lyle or Lyle/Joseph contrast so sharply on the surface. Yet, Joseph has the ability to plug into that rage, to wear a mask that radiated lethal fury during the movie. In person, he was Lyle's opposite. He took my son under his wing and made him feel welcome and special--something not every Hollywood personality is gifted with. He deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of Lyle--I'm sure he (as do most of us) has an inner Lyle, but to bring him to life so persuasively without being possessed by him personifies the magic/art/craft of acting. I hope he will continue to be choosy about scripts and look forward to seeing more of his stage magic in the future.

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