Deleted scenes: the scandal-hit Sundance favourites

Sundance film festival wrapped last weekend, and with it came the annual unofficial competition for which film could score the priciest distribution deal out of the festival – won, at least so far, by Olivia Wilde’s comedy The Invite, which sold to A24 for a reported £9m. But for every Coda (bought by Apple for a record £18m) or Little Miss Sunshine that goes from Sundance bidding war to box office or Oscar glory, there’s an expensive, much-hyped acquisition that goes pretty much nowhere. Three years ago, the most heated bidding war was over the Irish musical Flora and Son: if you haven’t heard of it, most of the world is with you.

Sometimes these films wilt outside the festival hothouse because a critical backlash kicks in. The case of once-buzzy Sundance premiere Magazine Dreams is more unusual. Picked up by Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures at the 2023 festival, Elijah Bynum’s tough-minded drama about an aspiring bodybuilder’s psychological collapse was well reviewed, attracting particular praise for its leading man’s gutsy, gruelling performance. The “Oscar” word was mentioned, and Searchlight promptly scheduled an awards-friendly December release.

But the leading man in question was Jonathan Majors then hot from TV’s Lovecraft County and signed up to the Marvel machine. Two months after the film’s Sundance premiere, he was arrested on assault, strangulation and harassment charges against his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari; by the year’s end, he’d been convicted. Searchlight dropped the movie, returning the rights to the film-makers. Two years later, courtesy of independent distributors, it received a marginal cinema release. (In the US, it was taken by Briarcliff Entertainment, an outfit that specialises in films no one else wants to touch; last year, it nabbed a couple of Oscar nominations for Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice.) As of last week, it is now available for audiences on demand in the UK.

Does anyone really want to, though? The film’s substantial merits remain: it’s a perceptive, nerve-fraying study of damaging body culture and misplaced masculine ideals, at first tightly coiled and later disturbingly unravelled, while Majors’s performance is impressive in both its visceral physical commitment and high-wire emotional abandon. But it’s hard to keep our knowledge of the actor’s actions away from this portrait of toxic masculinity, especially as the character’s mental breakdown turns increasingly violent. What was already hard to watch becomes altogether hard to stomach.

It’s unfortunate for Magazine Dreams’s talented makers that their work has been cursed by factors outside their control. For Searchlight Pictures, meanwhile, it was an unfortunate echo of a previous scandal: in 2016, it bought Nate Parker’s slave rebellion epic The Birth of a Nation after its lauded Sundance premiere, again with lofty awards-season ambitions, only for the film to be derailed by the uncovering of past rape allegations against its director-star. Parker was acquitted but no one seemed in the mood to see Parker as a civil rights hero, least of all in a film that, once the dust settled, many critics found heavy-handed and luridly gruesome.

Movies thrown off course by unrelated scandal often aren’t a great loss to the culture: the mediocre Ponzi scheme drama Billionaire Boys Club (Now), the last film Kevin Spacey made before his fall from grace in 2017 in 2017, was eventually released, but it barely deserved to be.

Occasionally, an almost abandoned film is worth the effort: see another Searchlight Picture title, Kenneth Lonergan’s thorny post-9/11 masterpiece Margaret, which spent six years in legal limbo over scandal but paralysing creative differences. When it finally emerged in 2011, it felt all the more vital, all the more urgent, for the struggle it endured to be seen.