Cinema often requires a certain suspension of disbelief. But what happens when a movie demands too much of it, without providing the viewer any emotional reasons to justify the leap? That is, in a nutshell, the experience of watching “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” an idiosyncratic romantic fantasy that never quite manages to sell the against-the-odds love story unfolding between its two incredibly alluring commitment-phobes, Margot Robbie’s Sarah and Colin Farrell’s David, who meet at a wedding.
That’s too bad, as director Kogonada is certainly the kind of observant artist who can mine reserves of humanity and melancholy in the most unexpected of places — from the sharp edges of modern architecture (“Columbus”) to the data bank of an android (“After Yang”). But part of the problem here is an already insubstantial script (by Seth Reiss, of the brilliant satirical horror “The Menu”) that doesn’t have its directorial match. While “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is concerned with the ways memory, grief, and loss shape our future, its fanciful nature begs for a flashier style and therefore feels out of place under Kogonada’s minor-key touch. Not helping matters is the story’s baffling (sometimes, annoying) sense of humor, actively working against the big, bold, beautiful life lessons the movie desperately attempts to prescribe.
The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably. Most of the time, both Farrell and Robbie seem detached and surprisingly cold when they are supposed to be embracing intimate, vulnerable feelings audiences know they’re more than capable of projecting. We meet Farrell’s David first, when he is forced to rent a vehicle to get to his friend’s wedding, after his own car gets booted. The rental agency he finds is the kind of place anyone would think twice about setting foot in (that is, unless they are in a David Lynch movie): a vast warehouse with two chatty, in-your-face agents (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, stuck with some aggressively unfunny lines) and two identical, circa-‘90s cars with strange GPS add-ons. David drives away with one of the cars. And soon enough, we find out that Sarah has checked out the second to get to the same wedding.
What follows is a poorly sketched meet-cute between Sarah and David at a venue called “La Strada” (in a possible wink to a sophisticated, Federico Fellini-esque sense of whimsy that never arrives). And as the two abruptly start discussing who would hurt the other one first in case of a romantic involvement, no signs of on-screen chemistry emerge between them. Still, they end up in the same car after Sarah’s breaks down, as the vehicle’s bizarre GPS with a sensual voice serves as a matchmaker of sorts between the solo travelers.
On the way, they stop by a number of doors that provide Sarah and David portals into some defining moments of their past. Premature births, parental abandonment, missed connections, young heartbreaks, and chances that slipped through their fingers. As the distinct doors open one after another into hospital rooms, school auditoriums, neighborhood diners and childhood homes, both Sarah and David get offered a chance to smooth out former wrinkles and become the kind of people unafraid to commit to new relationships.
Admittedly, there are a few delightful chuckles along the way. Among them is a brief performance of the musical “How to Survive in Business Without Really Trying,” joined by a game Farrell. And there is at least one instance when the drama works, especially when Sarah briefly reunites with her mother over the promise of a modest mashed-potatoes dinner and a viewing of “Big.” Still, we get thrown into this brave new world of doors and remembrances all too hastily, without any attempts at a thematic or visual world-building.
Consequently, the fact that neither Sarah nor David questions their circumstances in any real way doesn’t make a lot of sense. And even with the few rules that the film sets up for itself, everything we see feels distant, implausible and artificial, as if we’re stuck inside Sarah and David’s own “The Truman Show,” no matter how insistently “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” tries to turn us into lovers and believers. Compared to recent and lovably imperfect dramas like “The Life of Chuck” and “We Live in Time” that also interrogate human life’s bygones, Kogonada’s movie rarely swells hearts in the way that it should.
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Despite some pretty lens flares, cutesy needle drops (including a downbeat cover of “Let My Love Open The Door”) and the occasional big, bold, beautiful things that pass by the window, the only destination “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” approaches in the end is an unfortunate bore.
From Variety US