We all say we want movies that take chances. But what do we do when we get them? Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp. And yet there’s something honest and clean about it. This is a story about two single, fortyish-plus people who meet either by happenstance or some preordained design. Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) are instantly attracted to each other, but instead of allowing themselves to fall in love, they struggle to examine all the events, feelings, and experiences in their lives that have prevented them from committing in the past—in other words, they’re looking for excuses to not even get started. They’re locked in their respective, comfy patterns, and they’re old enough to think that perhaps this is the way it’s supposed to be. Idyllic romance is for the young; older and wiser, David and Sarah think they know better.
That all sounds like the workaday stuff of romantic drama, but A Big Bold Beautiful Journey—its script is by Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the 2022 foodie satire The Menu—takes some wacky swings, all presented with a deadpan flourish. As the movie opens, Farrell’s David is setting out for an out-of-town wedding, chatting with his parents on the phone as he heads off. He’s going alone, which is the way he likes it. But his parents seem hopeful that someday, he’ll meet that euphemistic special someone. “Life is better when you’re open,” his father advises somewhat unhelpfully. (We’ll see later that he’s played by a sweet, sympathetic Hamish Linklater.) David shrugs off his parents’ advice; he’s eager to get on the road, only to find that his car, parked on the street, has gotten the boot. Nearby, serendipitously or by cosmic plan, he spies a homemade-looking sign for a joint called The Car Rental Agency. It’s run, out of a sort of cavernous airplane hangar, by two cryptic, possibly otherworldly beings, played by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. They saddle him with a 1994 Saturn, and even though he plans to use his phone to navigate, they talk him into renting the in-house GPS, which turns out to have mystical properties, directing him to specific places that will trigger soliloquies about his upbringing, his teenage dreams and disappointments, and his inability to find lasting love.
But before any of that happens, David meets Robbie’s Sarah, a fellow wedding guest. They flirt cautiously, but Sarah makes it clear that she’s not the type to commit. In these early scenes, Sarah sets off warning bells that she’s going to be, in the words of critic Nathan Rabin, one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl who gives off “I’m ever so bad for you, but you’re going to want me anyway” vibes.
In fact, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey sets off one warning bell after another. It often veers too close to sentimentality. Plus, any use of the word journey is immediately suspect in my book. But even when I wanted to scoff at what I was seeing onscreen, I couldn’t. David and Sarah don’t get together at that wedding—she leaves, and goes to bed, with someone else—but their paths cross later, again only seemingly by chance, at a roadside Burger King. Sarah’s car—also rented from the wackadoodle duo at the Car Rental Agency—breaks down, and she accepts a lift from David. Together, they’re prompted by that mystical, magical GPS to seek out a series of doors to nowhere. As they walk through each, they’re brought to specific times and places that made them who they are. Sarah returns to the museum she and her late mother used to love to visit, which resurrects her feelings of guilt over not being at her mother’s bedside when she died. David revisits the night he starred in his high school production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which he remembers chiefly for the way he was rebuffed by the girl he had a crush on. These are the things—sometimes trivial, sometimes of great magnitude—we hang onto as we stumble through life. In witnessing each other’s painful memories, David and Sarah learn a lot about each other, perhaps too much.
Everything about A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is stilted and odd, but I found that more endearing than off-putting. Kogonada is a thoughtful, perceptive filmmaker. His previous two fiction features, After Yang (2021) and Columbus (2017), explore oblique cloudlike swaths of memory and grief, of simply longing to become. They’re movies you have to sit with for a while; they take full shape only in the hours and days after you’ve watched them. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is different. Kogonada is going for a kind of stylized dreaminess here; the movie isn’t so much surreal as semi-real. To watch Farrell, one of our most soulful contemporary actors, giving his teenage all to a big number in How to Succeed—his eyes rimmed with that classic high-school drama department eyeliner—is to be forced to live in the wild-and-woolly moment. And Robbie, so serenely, perfectly beautiful, is playing a character teeming with self-loathing. Somehow we want to believe that beautiful people don’t have problems, but shouldn’t we know better? A Big Bold Beautiful Journey takes chances, and not all of them pay off. At times it’s almost egregiously self-conscious. But what kinds of dividends are we looking for here, exactly? This is a question mark of a movie, entreating us to trust in the spirit of the moment. There’s something searching and wistful about it. And who doesn’t, once in a while, need to be freed from the tyranny of certainty?
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