Those Crazy Kids

MANIC

Director: Jordan Melamed

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Cheadle, Michael Bacall, Zooey Deschanel, Cody Lightning, Elden Henson, Sara Rivas

Lyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is pissed off. Raging even. He's stuck in a hospital room, his head bleeding, when a doctor (Don Cheadle) comes by questioning him. He is the staff pyshchiatrist and he begins to wonder out loud how Lyle "got his ass kicked". Lyle ignores him, resisting having to talk to this institutionalized excuse of a man. He especially will not talk to a man accusing him of tweaking, or worse, being a pansy.

It turns out, Lyle is not some innocent victim here, he smashed another kids head in with a baseball bat. The boy becoming a victim of uncontrollable rage. His mother, scared to death of her own son, calls the authorities to have him committed until someone else can figure out what to do with him. He winds up in the Northward Mental Institution, confronting a various pack of troubled kids, joined together out of nothing but relentless and surly anger.

As kids-in-pysch-ward films go, this one is pretty run of the mill: a pattern of abuse started in youth, continued with them, eventually effecting their teenage lives. The kids comfort eachother, taking hold of the only stability they have yet to encounter, some comfort even resembling something more along the lines of romance in the case of Lyle and Tracy (Zooey Deschanel). Manic leans heavily on familiarity, making the kids victims of abuse by both parents and ward attendants alike. As the film's pyschology spells out, this pattern of abuse makes the kids themselves  fearful and abusive, unable to committ or make informed decisions.

The most effective scenes in the film, are without a doubt the scenes in which they kids are observed from afar (without the distractions of the loud "crow man" in the basketball court). Many of these scenes include "real kids" institutionalized teens who agreed to be in the movie. The actors, spend a lot of time in the rec room, either relaxed, raged or dazed, as their meds make it difficult to do anything but watch the tv. Lyle and Chad (Michael Bacall) are eventaully given the opportunity to self medicate (weed it up!) in the bathroom, while blasting the radio. They take the party out to the rec room for music hour and slip in their own tape while the attendant goes outside. The two proceed to slam themselves around the room, breaking whatever is in their path, and grabbing the attentions of the other kids, who join in. Now in the middle of a mosh pit, they'd be fine, but here, this could lead to nothing other than disaster.

The basic lesson here is that these kids are completely on their own, even the adults here who mean well, cannot truly help them. No Nurse Ratched here to boss you around, just you and you alone. Which leads us back to David, struggling more and more to figure out how to deal with the charges--let alone how to help these kids. David's approaches are alternatively conciliatory and confrontational asking questions like "How do you deal with your anger?" or "Tell me right now, what is one thing that gives meaning to your life?". Despite his efforts, he rarely gets a magical movie answer and little progress is made.

David's complexity is symbolic for his inner frustration and anxiety, displayed by a mundane question and answer session in his office. This montage seems overly ordinary at first, until Lyle turns into Tracy, who turns into Chad who finally turns into David himself being in the patient's chair. Whether this means he is imagining himself as them or is them is irrelevant. They are all searching for some sort of "meaning" to life, but what are the chances of finding it in an underfunded institution who's idea of "recreation" is one basketball hoop and a few benches? Just so, the group discussions go off into complaints tangents, and no matter how hard David tries he cannot seem to get them to give "constructive" responses to one another's rare, heart felt admissons. They refuse to feel responsible for themselves, let alone eachother; with his own sense of responsibility suffocating them.

It isn't David's fault, of course. Manic, is a movie studying learned behavior: Lyle's father beat him around, as did every other aspect of society around him, insisting he is unworthy, dysfunctional, inferior even. Kenny (Cody Lightning) is by far the most outrageous case: A native American kid, whose father left him with a medicine bag to ward off "evil bad things" and whose step father is just that, compelled to sexually abuse him even right in front of David in the visiting room. His stepfather even being allowed into the building is a crime in and of itself., but it does one hell of a job providing a visual image of the damage adults can really do.

Is there actually a way to save a kid from drowning in the currents of an abusive relationship? Manic.