Somewhere in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” you can untangle its intentions: to make a kind of normie version of a Charlie Kaufman movie, sanding down the unruly edges and adapting the high-concept sweep about love and life onto a more agreeable, commercial canvas. It’s all in the title. But what this film ends up being is mostly the wispy concept of big feelings and a fantastical odyssey solely in name.
Things get muddled fast, as the movie, directed by Kogonada, all too eagerly throws us into magical realism before establishing emotional stakes, rules or a sense of our central lovers. The film relies mostly on the tart charm of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, an administrator of the story’s enterprise, for us to buy in without questions asked; it almost succeeds. Even as the movie tries to work backward to flesh out its characters later on, it feels too late.
There is the vague idea that David (Colin Farrell) is lost and jaded, and Sarah (Margot Robbie) is broken and spiky, before their stilted meet cute at the wedding of mutual friends leads to a multidimensional road-trip adventure in which the pair soon find doors that are portals to the past. Off they go on said journey, but it’s not ever quite clear what the point of all this whimsy and wonder is or why we ought to be rooting for Sarah and David.
Much of this can be traced back to a confused script, written by Seth Reiss, that Kogonada cannot save. For the director, who expertly crafted atmospheres and characters with rich emotionality in his first two films (“Columbus” and “After Yang,” both of which, crucially, he also wrote), it might have worked in theory to trade his existential sentimentality for a more earnest one here. But instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.
Still, the film is oddly muted in its technical construction for a work that is clearly selling itself on emotional swells. You would think that for a movie with such a title there’d be a bit more big lights and conventional grandiosity, but there’s a formal limpness to the way it tugs at one’s heartstrings.
Farrell suffers the most in this regard, as he offers a genuine, if futile, attempt to inject some human tangibility to David. Conversely, Robbie is stuck with a flat character — like the conventional cousin to the manic pixie dream girl. The spark between them never finds its way onscreen, and we’re left with a dimension-spanning love story of two powerhouse stars that is strikingly cold.
By the final stretch, when the movie belatedly reaches for some substance, it’s more about Sarah and David finding the resolution in their own stories. Their individual catharsis is somehow meant to lead them back to their romance, putting the movie on two different tracks. By then, it’s a bold and beautiful journey that we’ve realized was missing a map.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.
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