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MAGAZINE DREAMS JONATHAN MAJORS.jpeg

Sundance Review: Jonathan Majors Is A Muscle-Bound Powerhouse In 'Magazine Dreams'

By Jason Adams | Film | February 6, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | February 6, 2023 |


MAGAZINE DREAMS JONATHAN MAJORS.jpeg

Is there some point where you become such a fanboy that you shouldn’t be allowed to write reviews of the thing that you nerd out so hard for anymore? I feel as if I do indeed toe the line with the actor Jonathan Majors these days, whose myriad talents—both professional and physical—have been leaving me deeply agog ever since he first caught my eye as the endearing weirdo Montgomery in the 2019 masterpiece The Last Black Man in San Francisco. One of my very first posts here at Pajiba was submitting Majors for the “Pajiba 10” in 2020, wherein I enthusiastically put all his praises on the record, right up front. So can my critical faculties be relied on with regards to him? Should you even trust my opinion?

Whether you should ever under any circumstances trust my opinion is a better question, but one where the questioning will unravel the very idea of movie criticism itself (or at least my opinion of my little notch within said structure) so let’s, uhh, let’s leave all of that for another day. Today we’re here to talk about Jonathan Majors’ new movie—from Hot Summer Nights film-maker Elijah Bynum this one is called Magazine Dreams and it stars the forthcoming Kang and Creed 3 villain as a wannabe-bodybuilding-superstar conspicuously named Killian Maddox.

That’s a lot of name but no worries—Majors is a lot of man here. The single promotional image released for the movie when its Sundance festival premiere was announced, which showed Majors in truly gargantuan shape and posing in the world’s teensiest posing brief, set the internet onto immediate fire. You know that sound a gas oven makes when it ignites? Imagine that coming off every computer. I knew that day for certain that I am not the only person dizzily intoxicated by what Majors is currently serving, anyway.

Even though he’s been front and center on a couple of posters before this, Magazine Dreams very much marks the first time Majors can been called a film’s true leading man—the fine and underrated Korean War film Devotion was a two-hander with Glen Powell, while the too-short-lived HBO series Lovecraft Country was very much an ensemble. But surprising no one who’s seen him in anything (least of all this fanboy here), Majors is more than up to the task of holding the center of the frame in his teensy posing strap for this measly two hours. His work in Magazine Dreams is enormous, electrically charged, alternately terrifying, and endearing; funny and an absolute freak-show. Majors just makes the weirdest choices (wait until you see the on-stage grimace that Killian mistakes for a smile) and remains riveting because the choices he makes work while also still surprising me at every turn.

As for the film itself, it feels as if Bynum, who wrote the script on top of directing, watched Taxi Driver and proposed to himself a question—what if Travis Bickle was Black? Sixty years after the hey-day of the Civil Rights Movement the sight of a powerful Black man remains in itself a terror in this racist country of ours—you make that powerful Black man angry, and then you give him a gun, and you’ve got every whitey’s worst nightmare come to life. You can see it in one of the biggest places where conversations about gun control seize right up in this country—even liberals can’t help but make revealingly uneasy jokes about how quickly conservatives will change their guns-for-all tune when Black people start arming themselves as freely as Jethro and Karen do down in Pennsyltucky, ho ho.

And so we come back to that character name. Killian Maddox. It is surface-level aiming for a lot—for iconography. It brings to mind killing, mad dogs, and it ends on that hard X. It’s a name you don’t forget easily. One that the filmmakers, meaning both Byrnum and Majors himself, were clearly hoping could stand alongside a “Travis Bickle” or a “Tony Montana”—a cinematic signifier of something bigger than just one man. Not that you’d have an easy time being bigger than Killian Maddox! When we first see him in the movie he’s a statuary, a single figure glistening above us in a chandelier-laden ballroom as composer Jason Hill’s gorgeous orchestral score swoons around him. The camera looks up at him like we do Michaelangelo’s David—our mouths should very much drop agape. I would argue that it’s only right to fanboy out in this particular moment. The movie, those muscles, are begging for our worship.

Of course, the reality is far off from this fantastical first impression, and the film’s swerving between the two tones, between his big dreams of stardom and the insidious snake-like “kill yourself” filled comments section of his YouTube account, is where most every ounce of the film’s tension is born. Killian, it is clear quickly, is not mentally well. Very soon we’re introduced to his court-mandated therapist (the legend Harriet Sansom Harris, who can do more with a crinkle of the edge of her mouth than most actors can do with pages of dialogue), and we’re listening to Killian’s hopeful delusions tumble forth unfettered. He wants magazine covers and big-time meathead fame, and he’s willing to sacrifice everything, too much of everything, for it.

For now though he’s just bagging groceries—I can’t imagine Byrnum didn’t also have Mickey Rourke and Aronofsky’s The Wrestler on his mind with this setting—and taking care of his elderly and unwell “paw-paw” (Harrison Page). And also Killian spends some quality parts of his every-other days staring longingly at the sweet-faced cashier Jessie (Haley Bennett), who works on an alternate schedule than him but who he tentatively stalks all the same. From there every other waking moment is for smashing—smashing weights the size of bulldozers, smashing food in his face, smashing needles full of steroids into his bare bum, and smashing his bare head through car windows. All in a day’s work!

The best moments in Magazine Dreams are the ones that offer us some levity from its sometimes stifling nihilism—I thought everything with his doomed-before-its-begun romance with Jessie was top-notch; Bennett has a lovely soft presence that doesn’t fit into Killian’s clanging smashing banging world at all, and their disastrous first date, which involves Killian ordering every item on the menu to keep his protein levels up as he simultaneously spills the beans about his traumatic childhood, is a miniature masterclass in cringe. Similarly, another scene set in a diner, where Killian confronts a bad man in front of his small children, works its own magic blend of mad humor opposite all of the awfulness. (Diners, now stereotyped as the place where the New York Times goes to question grotesque Trump Voters, have had this comeuppance coming.)

But the problem with Magazine Dreams, an ultimately imperfect film as it stands, is that it bites off far more than it can possibly chew, even while Killian and Majors are personally for damn sure gonna try to chew everything put in front of them. The movie has about ten endings and about one hundred ideas for each one of them, and even after two watches, I’m not entirely sure what it’s ultimately trying to say. Notes of sexual confusion and sudden grace are left dangling, confusing its themes in ways that are left underexplored. The movie I was most reminded of was Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal, in both the sleek and seedy cinematography as well as Majors’ own dedication to investing character in an extreme physical transformation. But that earlier film, as simple as it might have ultimately been—our media system is poisonous!—felt like it found some answers to the questions it put forth. Magazine Dreams retains too many question marks scratched into those beefy delts.