Thursday, May 22, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Anger mismanagement

Manic takes a grim trawl through teen angst

By Anthony Allison

"Everybody's angry nowadays," sighs burly psychiatric ward orderly Lydell M. Cheshier to Manic's compassionate psychologist, Don Cheadle. But although you may be mildly irate after enduring this edgy, teen psychodrama, you're more likely to be suicidally depressed.

Written by cast members Blayne Weaver and Michael Bacall, Jordan Melamed's first feature, which has languished in oblivion since debuting at Sundance in 2001, takes a familiar stroll through the well-traveled landscape of teen angst. But unlike outstanding examples of the genre like Better Luck Tomorrow, Ghost World and The Virgin Suicides, this one is unremittingly grim. Unlike One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's notably lacking in lightness, hope, inspiration or catharsis.

The drama centers on Lyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable as the kid from "3rd Rock from the Sun"), a surly delinquent who, after beating a schoolmate with a baseball bat, is sent to a Southern California juvenile detention facility: call it "Boy, Interrupted" or "Cuckoo's Nest: The Y-Generation." There, he meets the usual therapy group suspects: bipolar approval seeker (Bacall), abused Native American (Cody Lightning), bully/gang-banger (Elden Hanson), goth with Van Gogh fixation (Sara Rivas) and nightmare-plagued shrinking violet (Zooey Deschanel).

As Dr. Cheadle utterly fails to work through his dysfunctional patients' anger management issues, the film builds to an underwhelming climax and a wistful ending expressing the hopelessness of it all.

Exacerbating the overall agony is the Parkinson's disease handheld camerawork and Attention Deficit Disorder editing that are de rigueur with young filmmakers who mistake style for substance. Who's to blame for this regrettable trend (French New Wavers, their Danish Dogme '95 heirs, MTV, the Blair Witch) is arguable, and moot, because we're stuck with it. But viewers who can't stomach more than the human threshold of (20 minutes of) this herky-jerky high-def video stuff, might consider a Prozac overdose instead.