There’s a moment towards the end of Kogonada’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” where David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are sitting at a table across from their respective exes. The exes are waiting for David and Sarah to explain why they broke up with them – and not the canned answers they gave the first time around (because this has all happened before), but the truth.
After a long silence, David finally says, “I’ll go.” He hard launches into a monologue where he explains what his damage is in detail, taking advantage of this fantastical opportunity to finally be honest and say how he feels.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is a series of “I’ll go” moments – that is to say, a string of sequences where its two stars tell each other and the audience exactly how they feel about everything, falling in love by way of therapy-speak in a film that barely delivers a surface-level explanation of the leap of faith that is falling in love. The bare bones, dully-framed characters feel more like faint impressions of people than people themselves, and the script, penned by Seth Reiss, feels like a waste of both of its actors’ and Kogonada’s strengths.
After a “ships passing in the night” interaction at a wedding, David and Sarah link up the next day when they find out they both got their rental cars from the same obscure company. Both cars contain a magical GPS (yes, you read that right) that implores David and Sarah to take a “big, bold, beautiful journey” together, traversing back in time through strange, fantastical doorways that lead them to important moments and places of their past. They’ll have to reckon with that past before they can forge a future together.
Boiled down to its essence, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is about the ways in which we perform for other people – the front that we put up when we’re too afraid to truly let someone in. It makes sense then that in some ways, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” feels like an old-school MGM musical. It’s in the lineage of something like “Brigadoon” – bright and colorful, an earnest romantic fantasy that treats its magical elements with nothing but the utmost sincerity.
At first, the film’s staginess works quite well. David’s first interaction with the proprietor of the rental car company (a quite funny, if misplaced Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is full of the problems that will continue to plague “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” throughout, including dialogue with a complete lack of subtext – it’s here that Waller-Bridge’s character first tells David there are moments of truth in performance, one of the movie’s key themes (and also one of the movie’s key themes to be spoken out loud during the movie).
But at least here at the beginning, Kogonada is able to match his visual style with the performative nature of the dialogue (“I’m not an actor,” David says at one point, as a spotlight suddenly descends upon him). It might not be subtle, but it’s performative with a purpose. Unfortunately, Kogonada is unable to keep up with the stilted cloyingness of the dialogue for the rest of the film – apart from one important exception.
For the most part, any spark that Kogonada is able to inject into the film putters out as soon as anyone starts talking. In “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” people speak to each other in vague terms (the person who introduces David and Sarah tells them that they live in the same city – what that city is called, who’s to say?). Characters give the impression of a deep inner life through dialogue alone. They fall in love in the way that children might, instead of full grown adults with years of emotional baggage. They mostly tell each other the truth. If they think the other person is lying, they call it out immediately. The person who is called out almost always gives in. There is nothing running under the surface, no feelings for the audience to root out, no subtleties to pick up on.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is void of complexity – not in the type of way that makes for a fun, easy watch, but rather in a way that can be mind-numbingly dull. Robbie and Farrell both try to match the tone of the film, but what they’re asked to do is devoid of what makes both of them interesting performers, including his puppy-dog petulance and her intensity and brashness. There’s no heat between them, despite the fact that they are ostensibly in conflict with each other for the majority of the film’s runtime. During their climactic, big blow-out fight, the visual language is nothing more than a series of cuts between medium and close-up shots of their faces. A car literally explodes at the end of this scene – not really to underscore the fight, but rather to remind the audience that this exchange has any heated emotion in the first place.
There is one sequence – that exception mentioned earlier – that is proof there is an interesting movie hiding beneath the surface. One of the doors David has to travel through takes him back to his high school on the night of the school musical, forcing him to perform the lead role in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
Besides being one of the most visually exciting moments in the film (maybe Kogonada should direct a musical?), this sequence finally, finally contains a bit of substance as David wrestles with his feelings for his teenage crush. He’s taken back to a fateful moment where he stopped performing and everything went wrong and slips back into habits he thought long abandoned at the drop of a hat. For a moment, it feels like “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is finally getting at something. But that door closes all too quickly.