From Sundance: Magazine Dreams provides the cinematic jolt we’ve been missing
I watched six Sundance films from my couch and was reminded what I look for in a great film—and what I’ve been missing
In the opening moments of Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, one of the new documentaries that screened a few weeks ago at the Sundance Film Festival, we watch from the windows of a Ukrainian hospital that is surrounded by Russian tanks. The camera fixes on one stalled tank and the two wrecked, abandoned city buses nearby. The only movement is a curious dog scampering among the ruined buses. The dog is, I think, dressed in a doggie onesie. It is winter, and the dog, at some point, had an owner who wanted to keep it warm. As the dog continues its investigation, we see the tank begin to move and the barrel pivot toward the film crew recording from the hospital. This is going to be more than I can handle, I thought. But I couldn’t stop myself from watching.
At this point, Bananas, one of my own dogs, dug into my side, and pressed herself into my ribs for the duration. We were on my couch, watching from home, part of the Sundance virtual audience, an opportunity created by the pandemic that has continued now as part of a new tradition. I appreciate the opportunity, but watching these first-look films from a distance amplifies what I love about film festivals and movie theaters: the ability to turn and gauge the response of the rest of the audience. Sometimes you don’t even need to speak and look to gauge it, you can actually just feel it. But watching from home, the intensity (or mediocrity) of a film has nowhere to go other than to ricochet through my own brain and possibly down to my digestive system.
One the powerful things about that opening from 20 Days in Mariupol, and that poor dog caught accidentally on film, in the worst place at the worst time, is that watching it I knew that this was the least of the awful things that were about to transpire. The film’s point-of-view becomes centered around the hospital by necessity: the film crew shelters there, stealing Wi-Fi and data signals when they are available to transmit their images to the rest of the world. The location means they have a first-hand view of the incoming victims, and an overwhelming number of them are children and infants carried by their devastated parents. One boy arrives after having his legs blown off by a bomb while playing soccer with friends. Each painful episode is punctuated by the still images that we have seen already in the news; by juxtaposing the grief-filled, real-time video with the abbreviated coverage that mass media prefers, the film is a necessary bulldozer that reminds us that whatever we may think we know about war, the truth is even harder.
20 Days will be shown on PBS later this year, but I wish there was a way for it to be seen even more widely; I had the same wish for Collective a few years ago, but nothing I said could convince even my friends to see it. Instead, we will be fed movies like Theater Camp, which was snapped up quickly by Fox Searchlight for $10 million dollars. It is awful. I’d say it is unwatchable, but I was able to watch it, if only because a lot of talented people are involved and there’s something awe-inspiring in seeing talented people miss the mark. Mockumentaries are almost always awful, because their humor, or attempts at humor, almost always rely solely on belittling their subjects, which is both tiring and cruel. But they also feed our need to feel in on a joke, so even the most mediocre examples of the genre seem to find a willing audience. I was not a willing audience for this one, although I guess I bought a ticket hoping this would be an exception for me. The plot, in brief: the director of a summer theater camp (Amy Sedaris) slips into a coma after a stroke, leaving her staff to struggle to keep the camp financially afloat. That staff, which includes Ben Platt among others, is made up of self-important, jazz-hands deploying stereotypes of theater people. The entire thing feels like a pandemic-inspired redo of Waiting for Guffman, but…its not.
Two other selections made for an unexpectedly apt double feature. Run Rabbit Run stars Sarah Snook as a fertility doctor and single mother to an increasingly creepy daughter, while Other People’s Children features Virginie Efira as school teacher whose romance unravels as she bonds deeply and unexpectedly with her lover’s child. Efira is such a wonderfully curious presence in any film, and suddenly ubiquitous across a spectrum of French language films. Without her, Other People’s Children would be a forgettable but inoffensive slice of life, but her performance, and her way of relating to the other actors in any scene, elevates the entire film. And there’s something subversive in the way the film balances her character’s life: she’s intellectual, sexual and maternal, and the inevitable breakup scene at the climax is between her and the child—a first for me, and heartbreaking.
Run Rabbit Run is an effective little thriller. Snook starts out as a woman balancing work and childcare and slowly losing her grip, but we begin to realize that it is possible she never had a grip. Her young daughter finds a rabbit in the yard and wants to keep it as a pet; at night mom tries to toss the rabbit over the fence until she realizes her daughter is watching. The child begins wearing a handmade rabbit mask and confronting her mother’s shortcomings, as we begin to learn, in pieces, about an unsolved disappearance from the past. It’s all effectively done, but also a bit unformed in the end, the kind of film that leaves you wondering if you might of missed something—or was it the film itself that was missing something? It will be showing up on Netflix for you to make up your own mind.
Maybe the problem really is me. For most of the past year, the films I’ve ventured out to the theaters to see have been uniformly disappointing. Even the end of the year flurry of ambitious, awards-baiting films have been universally meh. For weeks, I kept thinking I should have seen Armageddon Time while it was still in theaters, and then I remembered that I had seen it, but had completely forgotten the experience. It is not good when the best you can muster in response to a film is to admire how carefully crafted it was, or how hard everyone tried. I want a film that scrambles something inside of me, that threatens, at least, to become part of my DNA. It doesn’t have to be a great or flawless film to accomplish this—some of my favorite films are also films that I can understand completely others’s claims of their faults. In Havana, in December, I caught the Turkish thriller Burning Days and felt alive again, and left the theater completely uncertain of how anyone else may have felt about it except that everyone was talking about the ending. (I hope to write about that one, but am waiting to see if it gets released in the USA.)
Writer/director Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams was apparently controversial in person at Sundance, with audiences split in their response. Of course, I only know this because I read about it. I can see why it isn’t a film for everyone, but it isn’t intentionally controversial, like so many other recent films that have been snapped up and spit out into theaters (Titane, The Triangle of Sadness, to name a few that have left me the wrong kind of cold). Weeks after the festival, Magazine Dreams still hasn’t found a distributor, or if it has they are keeping very quiet about it. And this is a movie with a HUGE, astonishing performance from Jonathan Majors, who already has a following from Lovecraft Country and the Last Black Man in San Francisco, and will soon be even more visible in Creed III, Ant-Man and the Wasp and the next Avengers. You would think he’d paid enough dues to have some traction with a film like this. (Update: Searchlight has reached a deal to distribute!)
Magazine Dreams was the kind of movie I’ve been waiting for; I felt changed by it. Riveting, at times painful to watch, incredibly, surprisingly moving. Majors plays Killian, an amateur bodybuilder who works as a stock boy at a grocery store and lives with his grandfather. His world is just about a small as a world can be, and he can’t see beyond it or the posters of bodybuilders that surround him on his bedroom walls and act as his only role models. He simmers with anger, shared with the audience in voice over, beginning with a diatribe about the absence of grocery stores in his own neighborhood. It’s a reasonable source of anger, because people should have access to food. But quickly we see that his rage runs deeper and is harder to control, and he doesn’t know how to even pretend that he’s like everyone else. He tries to take a check out girl to dinner; it doesn’t go well. All he can talk about is his workout routine and his enormous, obsessive intake of food as he orders multiple entrees brought to the table for himself. He writes long letters to his favorite bodybuilder, imagining a possible friendship; they go unanswered. He seeks out a crew that did a poor job painting his grandfather’s house, but his revenge against them does as much damage to his body as it does to their shop. The downward spiral is horrific and mesmerizing.
Some other early viewers have compared him to Travis Bickle, and the film to Taxi Driver. True, they are both studies of urban loneliness and mental illness, and they both manage to sweep the audience up into a desolate personality. But they really are two very different films. Majors’ performance is full of daring and the plot takes his character into situations I thought the filmmaker might avoid. But it is also full of compassion, and in the end, unexpectedly, that always elusive and hard to earn quality that we all need more of: hope.
A programming note:
In December, I returned to Cuba for the first time since the pandemic, and began recording conversations with friends there as part of a podcast. Cuba is an Onion is now online here on Substack as well as all the usual podcast locations: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, IHeart, Google Podcasts, etc.