How a lot do we wish one other Taxi Driver? Or one other Joker, for that matter? That’s a query {that a} viewer of the brand new movie Journal Goals might finally ask themselves. It’s additionally a query that the film appears to pose to itself. The movie, which premiered right here on the Sundance Movie Competition on Friday, is a grimly immersive dive into the top of an addled, violent younger man, a disaffected, delusional loner who threatens to destroy the intense world that so cruelly denies him entry.
Author-director Elijah Bynum is little doubt conscious of the acquainted thematic construction. He leans into these comparisons, then, assured that he’s discovered a unique approach of assault. In essential methods, he has. His boiling-over antihero, aspiring aggressive bodybuilder Killian (Jonathan Majors), is Black, and thus topic to vastly extra concrete societal ills and pressures than are the misanthropic Travis Bickles and John Q. Jokers of the cinematic world. And Bynum’s movie has a extra enlightened consciousness of the psychological well being struggles that push younger males into violent ideation. Killian’s journey towards smash is a few sick, unhappy world. However it’s, relatively much less nihilistically than Taxi Driver or Joker, additionally about one sick, unhappy man.
To play that man, Majors strains himself right into a mighty knot. He’s massively bulked up, which is spectacular. (Although, perhaps that was in the end for an additional film.) Extra notable is how totally Majors inhabits Killian’s troubled bearing—his tics, his blunt logic, his inflated thought of himself used to dam out the consuming ache at his middle. That is maybe the large efficiency followers of Majors have been ready for for the reason that Yale Drama grad first splashed onto the scene just a few years in the past. It’s a towering act of changing into.
However what’s all that effort in service of? Bynum has a eager aesthetic eye and employs a certain hand in ratcheting up the bodily and existential dread of the movie. He alludes to hazard early, exhibiting us Killian in court-mandated remedy following some form of outburst at a hospital. (His therapist is performed by the ever invaluable Harriet Sansom Harris.) However then we encounter Killian’s softer aspect: his stammering sweetness in asking a fellow grocery store worker out on a date, his heartbreakingly childlike fan letters to his bodybuilder idol, his doting take care of his ailing grandfather. There’s a weak individual in there, somebody struggling to make a connection. He’s simply so hampered, dwelling a life made up of a tragic previous, a tragic current, and what seems to be a tragic future. It’s arduous to not really feel one thing for that.
Which is maybe the movie’s salient argument. Violent males are sourced from someplace, in any case. One thing, or many issues, have occurred to them. And relatively than cordoning off these hurting males—criminalizing their psychological plight, mocking it on-line—shouldn’t we work towards a world (and, sure, a society) that provides them care? As Journal Goals unfolds, Bynum tells us in no unsure phrases that his film might be pointed at some form of horrible occasion. He then lets us marvel what another consequence would possibly appear like.
I’m undecided if that humanist thought, solely pawed at as it’s, is sufficient to overcome the harrowing nature of the movie. Journal Goals is an extremely powerful sit, in its visceral element and in the way in which Bynum agonizingly attracts all of it out. By a sure level, one questions the movie’s sympathy. Killian’s litany of ache—each acquired and delivered—begins to look extra sadistically torturing than compassionate. Simply as Killian flexes in what seems like mortal ache (he’s slowly killing himself with steroids), Bynum relishes within the brutal grind of his movie. A film concerning the horrors of masculinity does its personal form of macho preening, searching for to awe us with its feats of muscular daring—full with a heady sprint of homoerotic panic.
Who is aware of what, if any, instructive worth a movie like Journal Goals has these days. Possibly it needn’t have any of that—a ugly film can simply be a ugly film. However I think Bynum is attempting for greater than only a gnarly couple of hours. I’ll should mull over his movie, and perhaps pressure myself to observe it once more, to get a grasp on what I feel Journal Goals is basically doing and the way effectively it succeeds in that endeavor. Plain after a primary go to, although, is that Majors as soon as once more proves himself an actor to be reckoned with, an expansive and chameleonic artist who perhaps could make some sunny comedy after this. He’s so good at carrying us into the darkish of Journal Goals that I’d fortunately, eagerly, gratefully observe him again into the sunshine.
