Capturing emotional truth through whimsical fantasy and reality through artifice ranks among the highest degree-of-difficulty feats for any filmmaker to accomplish. The rare times that it works, you get a masterpiece like The Worst Person in the World or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, films that cleverly diverge from the laws of space and time but still emerge with a recognizable portrait of human behavior and vulnerability. More often, unfortunately, the results resemble A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, which offers a parade of banal bromides dressed up in self-conscious art direction.
Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy.
Sarah (Robbie) and David (Farrell) are singles who meet at a wedding; screenwriter Seth Reiss (The Menu) immediately plays his hand by having her inform him (within their first conversation) that she’ll probably wind up hurting him, and then asking him to marry her. They’ve both arrived at this event in cars rented by the mysterious The Car Rental Agency, which means they have 2004 Saturns equipped with old-school GPS machines. As David is driving back home, the GPS asks if he wants to go on a big bold beautiful journey, and so he crosses paths with Sarah again, and the two of them embark on a road trip through their respective pasts.
There are meaningful moments with parents — she gets to have one last conversation with her late mother (Lily Rabe), he reassures his father (Hamish Linklater) in a hospital waiting room — and there are visits to character-building growing pains that led to their current unattached status. Turns out the real big bold beautiful journey was the therapy they got along the way.
It’s not a terrible premise for a movie, and production designer Katie Byron (Problemista) goes out of her way to find moments of visual magic in everything from a rain-soaked wedding to a high-school musical, but Reiss’ script never gives either protagonist a third dimension. She feels unworthy of love and thus distrusts any man who displays it for her, and he got his heart broken early and could never commit again. That’s it. All the production filigree in the world — and there’s no shortage of it here — can’t make up for characters with all the depth of a “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” plaque.
Farrell and Robbie do a lot of drowsy whispering that’s supposed to pass for gravitas, and viewers who manage to stay awake will find themselves thinking about other films from these two actors that have much more complex ideas about human relationships. (The Lobster, we hardly knew ye.) Rabe’s sensitive portrayal feels beamed in from a much richer, smarter movie, and brief appearances from Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge serve only to remind how nice it would be to see either of them anchoring a much better film.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey unpacks a great deal of style to say very little, but style quickly turns grating when there’s no substance to back it up. Beautiful it may be, but Bold? Hardly.
Director: Kogonada
Screenwriter: Seth Reiss
Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater
Producers: Bradley Thomas, Ryan Friedkin, Youree Henley, Seth Reiss
Executive producers: Kogonada, Ilene Feldman, Micah Green, Daniel Steinman, John Atwood, Gino Falsetto, Ori Eisen, Paul Mezey
Cinematographer: Benjamin Loeb
Production design: Katie Byron
Editing: Jonathan Alberts, Susan E. Kim
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Sound design: Stephen Barden, re-recording mixer/sound designer; Jill Purdy, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Imperative Entertainment, 30West
In English
108 minutes
