“Some doors change everything.”
It’s easy to see what director Kogonada and writer Seth Reiss were going for with bringing A Big Bold Beautiful Journey to the screen. Clearly, the pair aimed to provide audiences with a life-affirming fantasy infused with whimsy, inspiring them to re-evaluate the lives they had been living up to that point, as they sat down in the theater. We know this genre, and there’s a reason people keep returning to it. If done right, films draped in fantasy, poetry, and humanity can usually move the people who are drawn to them to access their vulnerable side and perhaps approach the everyday with a little more openness and empathy than they had before…if done right.
In A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a pair of singletons named David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) meet at the wedding of a mutual friend. Although each person makes a less-than-favorable impression on the other, the two find themselves riding back to New York City together in a ’90s car that comes courtesy of a mysterious car rental agency. In their quest to get home, the car’s magical GPS system has David and Sarah making several stops along the way, in which they find themselves transported back into key moments from their respective pasts.
There’s one key reason as to why A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t work: its structure. All films dealing in some form of magical realism require the establishing of a set of rules that are given to both the characters and the audience to inform us and them on how the world we’re entering works. Kogonado and Reiss have decided not to do that. The result is that a series of unexplainable things just happen, with the characters never once questioning any of the extraordinary occurrences taking place. What makes this a problem is that a distance is immediately created between us and the pair we’re meant to follow. It’s a clear divide that signals us to say that we aren’t on the journey with them. Because of this, the audience finds themselves endlessly questioning the events and the meanings behind them, while the characters don’t. Have David and Sarah gone through something like this before? We don’t know. The string of scenes that comprise the script doesn’t provide much clarity and instead ends up making the whole experience feel bland and shallow as a result of the movie’s overall poor conception.
The non-existent structure isn’t the only issue with the film, however. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey as a cinematic experience proves to be little else than a dartboard of emotions. It feels as if the minds behind the film engaged in a game of darts wrapped in half-baked narrative plot points. Admittedly, one of those plot points hit close to home. At a certain point, Sarah is reunited with her dead mother (Lily Rabe) and gets to have the goodbye she never got before she passed away. Given my father’s death two years ago, this sequence got to me. But that’s happenstance, pure luck. Those scenes hit because I just so happened to be living a similar experience, not because the movie did anything particularly right in illustrating it. Had I not lost my father, those moments wouldn’t have hit me, and the movie would have failed again. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey aims for epiphanies at every turn, but comes up empty-handed, leading to one misguided sequence after another. These include David going back to perform in his high school musical and bear witness to the day he was born. Was this all supposed to mean something? Someone clearly thought it did.
It’s hard to blame the leads for anything other than agreeing to star in this movie. It’s hardly their fault that they don’t have anything resembling real people to play. David and Sarah are constructs with a list of traits that amount to little more than a bumble profile. That being said, both Farrell and Robbie manage to pull off a fun chemistry together, and the pair do try with all their might to inject some life into the proceedings, even when the movie itself tries its hardest to stop them. Faring better, and perhaps coming from a more thought-out version of this movie, are Kevin Kline and Waller-Bridge as the team behind the rental car company. Both are delightfully loony. Elsewhere, Rabe as Sarah’s mother and Hamish Linklater as David’s father manage to actually sell what passes for emotional beats in here.
In spite of all the negatives I’ve thrown at the movie, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey does surprise by doing a couple of things right. The movie looks, for lack of a better term, beautiful. It’s many flashes of color make the world, or worlds, David and Sarah find themselves in look so vibrant, even if they actually aren’t that beautiful up close. The script should also be applauded for its bravery in foregoing likability and presenting both of its protagonists’ flaws upfront. Finally, even if they don’t explain why, there’s something novel in the way the movie has its leads portray themselves at different ages and, sometimes, as different people whenever they walk through a door. Still, some doors just shouldn’t be walked through, and some scripts just shouldn’t be read.
