A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a Bitsy, Banal, Bland Jaunt

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie are excellent actors. Among their many accomplishments is a shared ability to sell romantic chemistry, healthy and unhealthy alike, with a scene partner—like Farrell’s work with Gong Li in Miami Vice and Robbie’s role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. Kogonada is an excellent director, having two thoughtful films under his belt with Columbus and After Yang, which gave their casts rich material for performances. But while A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Kogonoda’s third film, is impeccably composed and allows some moments for Farrell and Robbie to ply their considerable skill in building an on-screen relationship, it repeatedly and ultimately terminally sabotages itself.

In the movie, Farrell and Robbie are David and Sarah, two lonely people who meet at their mutual friends’ wedding but who are both so guarded that they’d rather ignore their mutual attraction than risk getting hurt. Unbeknownst to either of them, the ambiguously divine powers that be (manifesting as a car rental company run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the latter sporting an inexplicable German accent) will not have that. David and Sarah will push past the walls they’ve built around themselves. They will face the best and worst of their pasts and see what the other sees in them. They will meet people they knew once, and try to mend bridges or say what they couldn’t even though they appear as their past selves to everyone but each other and the audience (when David finds himself back at his high school play, his teachers and fellow students see a teenager. Sarah and the moviegoing audience see Colin Farrell). They will forge a connection. The magical GPSes that Waller-Bridge and Cline installed in Sarah and David’s rented Saturns insist on it. The two verbally consented to a Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and by golly, they’re going to get one.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey attempts overwhelming swoonworthiness, and lands on halting attraction, thanks to the rare moments where Robbie and Farrell get to build genuine connection. It tries to be sweepingly fantastic and hits lightly whimsical, thanks to an elaborate musical number borrowed wholesale from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It tries to stir the heart, and sometimes succeeds briefly, despite itself, as when David, transported to the day of his birth, tries to assure his anxious father (Hamish Linklater) that the sickly, prematurely born David will pull through. 

To put it cattily, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey feels like Everything Everywhere All at Once if it were made by capital T capital K Theater Kids as opposed to capital I capital K Internet Kids.

More seriously, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s script (written by Seth Reiss) lacks confidence in its core ideas and characters. To compensate for this, it frequently resorts to heavy-handed dialogue explaining what Farrell and Robbie’s characters feel and why. These moments are so thunderingly blunt that “The rat symbolizes obviousness!” feels like The Conversation’s legendarily ambiguous “He’d kill us if he got the chance” by comparison. It’s a creative decision that continually undermines Kogonada’s craft and Robbie and Farrell’s performances. Even more frustratingly, there’s a key scene that works in large part because it ties its bluntness to the lead duo and the progression of their relationship. David and Sarah find themselves in a cafe where they were both horrid to former romantic partners in different ways. Sarah and David’s reluctance to admit how they treated their partners in front of each other pushes the specters of their exes to demand answers until all they can do is confess. Here, the script’s heavy-handedness becomes a dam breaking under pressure. When Farrell and Robbie admit how they mistreated their partners, they do so with a compelling mixture of guilt, shame, and relief.  It’s a striking, memorable scene whose success in using bluntness as a tool makes the film’s failure to do so elsewhere stand out further.

When Robbie and Farrell get to do more than emphatically state what Sarah and David are thinking and feeling, they have solid romantic chemistry together. They establish and build that chemistry in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s best sequence, where Farrell inhabits his teenage self on the night that he starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and got his heart broken. It’s a hoot to see Farrell playing an anxious teenager, complete with dramatic high school theater eyeliner. The specificity of the sequence, with Farrell’s dancing and reliving raw heartbreak, Sarah drawing on her love of theater to save a song threatening to collapse on itself, and the duo’s subsequent shared joy, makes it a delight.

Too often, though, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mistakes “cliche” for “universal,” especially regarding Sarah’s story. Robbie does good work, but Sarah’s arc relies on hoary, overfamiliar beats– the daughter who never told her mother how much she meant to her, the student who slept with a professor. David’s tale, by contrast, has welcome idiosyncrasy in his grappling with his parents’ relative failure to teach him how to handle hurt and his tendency to prefer chasing partners over being in relationships with them. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s writing is frustrating at baseline, but, notably, most of the moments that work on paper are David’s. In contrast, the moments of Sarah’s that succeed are attributable entirely to Robbie.

The script’s broadness and bluntness, which repeatedly stifles Farrell and Robbie’s chemistry in favor of declaring what they’re feeling for each other, are unfortunately complemented by a soundtrack packed with sweeping, anthemic pop songs. They are good songs, and sweeping, anthemic pop has been used to powerful effect in modern cinema. The trick is that it needs to be used sparingly, lest the sweep turn to monotony and the anthem a drone. Much like its script, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s soundtrack opts for blunt statements rather than working in concert with Robbie, Farrell, or Kogonada and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb’s gorgeous visuals.

Going on a big, bold, beautiful journey requires taking leaps and trusting yourself and anyone you share that journey with. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, meanwhile, repeatedly gets in the way of Farrell and Robbie’s building David and Sarah’s time together and resulting relationship into a waltz worth taking. Its refusal to trust its strengths or audience is its undoing, resulting in a small, timid, hollow picture.

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