‘Russian Doll’ is a beautiful puzzle
Natasha Lyonne plays Nadia, a game engineer who keeps dying violently, magnificently
Russian Doll, which is now streaming in its eight-episode entirety on Netflix, is a beautiful puzzle piece, a circular, multiplane, existential mystery-comedy set in the villages of Lower Manhattan. Peopled with memorable characters large and small, it’s a show that having watched once — not hard to do straight through and hard not to do straight through — you may want to watch again, to admire its machinery and joinery and find the clues you might have missed, but also because it feels just as good the second time around.
Natasha Lyonne, who co-created the series with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, plays Nadia, a video game software engineer who keeps dying violently, often to slapstick effect, on the night of or the day after her 36th birthday. Each time she returns to the bathroom of the loft where her artist friend Maxine (Greta Lee) is throwing her a party she’d rather not be at for a birthday she’d rather not be having; Harry Nillson’s sonically cheery, lyrically weary Gotta Get Up greets her on the soundtrack at every return. It’s also the birthday of their friend Lizzie (Rebec- ca Henderson), which may account for the crowd; Nadia, though she can talk to anyone, in more than one language, is not exactly a people person. And her cat has been gone for three days.
The structural and thematic resemblances to Groundhog Day, in which the universe conspires to refine a character through repetition, are clear, but there is nothing unique in that borrowing by now. A quarter century on, it’s just cultural currency — a template, like A Christmas
Carol or The Bad News Bears, upon which to build fresh tales.
As a circular story that provides new information with every fresh turn of the wheel, it also resembles The Good Place.
There are also elements of the paralleluniverse film Sliding Doors and of every story in which strangers are forced by circumstance to work together to solve a mystery, which is to say it has Alfred Hitchcock in its DNA as much as it does Harold Ramis.
In classic detective-story fashion, the action travels from place to place as Nadia looks for clues and tests her theories: a synagogue, a Salvation Army shelter, parks and delicatessens, jewellery store, bars and back rooms.
Along the way we meet John (Yul Vazquez) who blew up his life for her; Mike (Jeremy Bobb), a pontificating one-night stand; a sort of guardian aunt, Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley, still glamorous and great) who is also a therapist, though not Ruth’s; the delicatessen clerk (Ritesh Rajan) who is a co-custodian of Nadia’s cat; and Horse (Brendan Sexton III), a homeless man who cuts hair.
Finally, at the end of the third episode, in a falling elevator, she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), whose story and character are a looking-glass counterpoint to hers.
Lyonne, especially, is marvellous, playing Nadia, as a sort of mix of Al Pacino and Julie Kavner (with maybe a hint of Larry David). It’s a terrific performance, wide-ranging and yet highly particular, in which self-protective vulgar bravado is softened by expressions of intelligence and tenderness.
The series’ points are hardly hidden — indeed, they’re explicitly stated, over and over again. If in the end it’s just a long meditation on the idea that people need people, a four-hour metaphorical expression of the fact that you have to abandon old patterns to move forward, it is wonderful all along the way and magnificent in its conclusion. And these ideas are no less powerful for being obvious; the world is choked with people trying to realise them in their own lives.