Related Articles
Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna have been friends since they were boys growing up in Mexico City, and they experienced a major career breakout together starring in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 coming-of-age road trip film Y Tu Mamá También. Given that shared past, you might expect them to share the screen often, in the same way that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have across their careers. Instead, they’ve only starred in two other films together, most recently back in 2012’s Casa di mi Padre. So their new Hulu miniseries, La Máquina feels like something of an event.
Bernal plays the title character, Esteban “La Máquina” Osuna, a revered Mexican boxer on the down slope of his career. He is divorced from glamorous reporter Irasema (Eiza González), continues to struggle with substance abuse and other demons, and is beginning to experience hallucinations and other debilitating effects from spending a lifetime getting punched in the head. Luna is Andy Luján, Esteban’s longtime friend and manager, whose own addiction problems trend towards Botox and self-tanner, and who seems weirdly more intimate with his mother Josefina (Lucía Méndez) than with his wife Carlota (Karina Gidi). When Esteban’s comeback fight ends in an improbable knockout victory, the two friends are plunged into a nightmarish conspiracy involving a mostly-unseen cabal known only as “the Other People.”
The show — Hulu’s first Spanish-language original — is trying out a lot of different ideas and tones, with the broad comedy of Andy’s bizarre home life jockeying for time with a thriller about Irasema investigating the Other People, psychodrama with Esteban coming to terms with all the physical and emotional trauma that gradually broke him, and the more traditional sports story of how, or if, Esteban can win an upcoming huge fight that the Other People want him to throw. Showrunner Marco Ramirez and director Gabriel Ripstein often struggle to make the pieces fit into their six-episode package, even if some of them work well individually.
Luna’s performance is wholly lacking in vanity. He looks like a caricature of himself, and often plays Andy as if he’s no more mature than Tenoch, the spoiled rich kid he played in Y Tu Mamá También. His scenes have an endearingly loopy energy, rarely going where you expect them to in either story or vibe. The fight material all feels lived-in — as Esteban’s charming longtime trainer Sixto, Jorge Perugorría joins a long tradition in boxing shows and movies of wise old men who always know the right words to use before the big bout — and Bernal plays Esteban’s torment with a raw vulnerability.
But the individual Esteban and Andy stories seem to belong in separate shows, the melodrama of one undercutting the silliness of the other, and vice versa. Esteban’s deep, dark secret doesn’t feel shocking enough for all the time devoted to building it up. González feels wasted in a rote investigation subplot that keeps repeating the same two or three points without getting anywhere. And the Other People are so nebulous and all-powerful that, after a while, they only make sense as yet another of Esteban’s hallucinations, even though the show keeps treating them as real.
Despite all of that, though, the chemistry between Bernal and Luna remains off the charts. Whenever they’re in the same scene, La Máquina feels like a unified show, rather than one struggling against itself. Andy’s presence gives Esteban permission to be a little lighter, just as being around Esteban forces Andy to take himself more seriously. Whether they are singing karaoke, talking about the good old days, or viciously cutting each other down with insults, the duo is never less than incredibly watchable.
In the same week that Alfonso Cuarón has his own new streaming miniseries, La Máquina even offers a joke that plays as something of a callback to to when Cuarón directed Bernal and Luna in a famous threesome scene: Esteban and Andy declare their love for one another, then reflexively clarify that each loves the other as a friend.
When Andy seeks Sixto’s advice about the mess they’ve found themselves in, the trainer replies, “All I know is we’re the last thing we do.” If La Máquina is the last project Bernal and Luna star in together, it won’t represent the peak of their collaboration. But it’s a good reminder of why they work so well together.
All six episodes of La Máquina are now streaming on Hulu. I’ve seen the whole thing.
