The American Dream leaves us corruptible at a soul level. There is darkness in our chase of independence. The American Dream held just out of reach. In this big, spiritually lost country, we just want to fill some amount of space before we die. We want to become bigger ourselves, to project something of our status, of our physical prowess, so that others know we have the inner and outer strength to persevere. The American Male is lonely. The Dream is being sold to them but they cannot buy in. The Dream is an advertisement of an idea, a tenuous concept kept out of reach so that we may always be in the chase. Indie-minded cinema is just the right place to capture the zeitgeist and the violent frustration of the American Male Experience.
In Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain (2013), materialism is tied to the American Male’s Dream of physical prowess, tapping into the language of bodybuilding and amusingly commodifying the experience by lensing it within muscular moviemaking, a meta exploration of the American psyche from a filmmaker who does not do nuance but has arrived at something more profound anyway.
But movies can go deeper. Which brings us to one of the most cinematic, thematically resonant, and empathetically acted movies about bodybuilding. Its characters are larger than life. They grow, both physically and emotionally, and the weight of their gains, in muscle and in spirit, are measurable by the filmic language used. We admire bodybuilders because they channel something bigger than themselves, something direct about the human experience: the fight against aging and time and gravity and social expectations. Finally, we have a movie that evokes the real beauty, difficulty, and ethically pressing problems of the sport, offering absolution to its characters and its audience in equal measure.
That movie is last year’s Love Lies Bleeding, a terrific work of genre fiction about bodies and people, a probable cult classic that ought to live more strongly in reputation than it has in our times.
This year, we also have Magazine Dreams. Director Elijah Bynum’s new movie is a festival-ready darling that belongs to that setting, where indie dreams and aspirations are enough for an audience. We’re all exhausted and we do not need to belabor the point: Jonathan Majors seemed like our next big star and has had the worst run of publicity of any star in recent memory. Discussing these things in reviews for movies can often seem to trivialize the very serious nature of accusations made. Be your own moral arbiter and make good faith decisions about who and what you really want to support. If we moralize without legal precedent and suggest a course of action, are we still reviewing a movie, or doing something else? Who gets to say who is cancelled and what the right pathway back to doing meaningful work ought to be? Not entertainment reviews, probably. We probably do not even need to separate an artist from their work to evaluate the work. Because the movie is not the artist and vice versa. Please be cognizant of your own triggers and know yourself, because what Jonathan Majors has performed in this movie is startling in its violent intensity as his character crashes out.
So, is Magazine Dreams good? You heard it was good before the accusations and is it still good now? It is still good. How good is it? Pretty good. Why is Magazine Dreams pretty good? Because it dances on the knife’s edge of vulnerability. Magazine Dreams plays like a one-note Scorsese movie without much nuance, which isn’t a terrible thing, but it only has one mode of storytelling, and it outgrows this mode before it arrives at its destination.
The now-cancelled Jonathan Majors centers the film as Killian Maddox (come on, naming convention guy), who just wants to get big. He worships and stans other bodybuilders. Cannot cultivate a good social life with his self-absorbed special interests. By the end, he’s flying off the handle and the performance is unnerving given literally everything.
Structurally, the movie doesn’t quite go. It starts and stops and moves along one direction until it ends but loses its threads in the middle and sort of coasts off of what had already been established. Besides a contentious best actor nod being possible, it’s hard to imagine anything else being in play, or that the delays will bear any fruitful outcomes now. Absolutely recommend last year’s Love Lies Bleeding, either instead of or in addition to this.