In Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey two attractive yet emotionally wounded people take a magical mystery tour of their complicated pasts, traversing space, time, and identity itself to relive the spirit-crushing moments that defined them so they might emerge capable of being loved. For all the high-concept whizbang — the characters’ actions are being guided by lo-fi technocrats functioning as non-denominational deities, directing their actions via a talking GPS in their rental car, sending them on a therapeutic scavenger hunt through their own memories — it’s fundamentally a chatty two-hander about people coming to terms with their complicated feelings about their upbringing and how disappointed they are in their own lives.
All of which is to say, special effects budget and the presence of bona fide movie stars notwithstanding, the film is actually superficially similar to the filmmaker’s modest debut Columbus (2017). There as here, two recently acquainted strangers get to know one another while traveling to and fro, visiting landmarks of personal significance while trying to draw attention away from their psychological scars. Yet the real difference between the two films is less a matter of scale and more one of spontaneity; there is none in A Bold Big Beautiful Journey. For all its new age platitudes about being open to new things and taking a leap of faith, the film is doggedly deterministic, following a tightly plotted course on a map where there’s little room for invention or genuine complications. In spite of all its adornments, it remains a brightly colored carnival ride on a straight track; no forks, dips, or sharp curves to be found.
Leaving his home by himself to drive to a friend’s wedding several hours away, David (Colin Farrell, carrying himself as though he were somehow unaware of how devilishly handsome he is) discovers a parking boot fastened to his car which coincides with an amateurish leaflet posted to the wall next to it advertising the nondescript “The Car Rental Agency.” Upon arriving at the cavernous, sparsely decorated space that houses the rental agency, David is greeted by two extremely odd employees (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the latter inexplicably doing a broad German accent and punctuating her sentences with curiously placed profanity) who inform him they have a 1994 Saturn (and only a 1994 Saturn) ready for him. They also needle him into taking the GPS package that comes with the car, insisting that his cell phone could “crap out” on the trip. Further, they have a professional headshot of David sitting on their desk (despite him having no memory of commissioning a headshot as he’s not an actor). It’s all the sort of behavior that might lead a more suspicious person to flee and Google Avis, but then that’s the level of credulousness with which the film’s characters operate.
After driving for hours through sunshowers — the apparently sentient GPS voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith cheerfully informs us that in Hawaii this is called “liquid sunshine” — David arrives at the wedding and immediately spots Sarah (Margot Robbie) from across the reception, who he engages in guarded flirting. He asks if she’d like to grab a drink (she declines); she asks whether he’d like to dance (he declines); she follows up with an impromptu marriage proposal, and neither David nor the audience can be certain whether it’s a put-on. Eventually they part, as Sarah finds another single guy to bring back to her room while David spends the rest of the evening staring longingly at her and sulking. Yet as each departs back to their regular lives the next morning, they are brought back together by benevolent forces beyond their control. On the drive home, David is prompted by the GPS as to whether he’d like to take the alliterative journey of the film’s title. Enthusiastically agreeing, David is instructed to get off the interstate and grab a “fast food cheeseburger” where he again spots Sarah in a neighboring booth, herself demolishing a Whopper.
After exchanging more pleasantries over lunch, Sarah finds that her car — wouldn’t you know it, also a ‘94 Saturn from the same rental company — won’t start, this just as David’s GPS urges him to “pick up Sarah.” And just like that they’re off an adventure together, following the directions of the car’s onboard computer, which guides them toward a series of doors — literally portals — dotting the countryside, each one magically transporting them to a different memory one or both of them experienced. One door leads to the modern art museum that Sarah and her late mother would explore during off-hours, while another finds David reliving his freshman year of high school when he played the lead in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and first had his heartbroken by the girl he had a crush on. Every successive door they walk through forces one of them to relive a foundational event in the shaping of their personality while allowing the other a glimpse into their damaged psyche.
But what exactly is this “big bold beautiful” journey in service of? Are the gods (or whatever Waller-Bridge and Kline are meant to represent) simply trying to force a relationship between David and Sarah, who spend the film alternating between making lovey-eyes at one another and forcefully protesting they can’t end up together because they’ll only hurt one another. Or is it just about healing the characters’ deep-seated insecurities, which have caused them to repeatedly torpedo their relationships (she’s a serial cheater, whereas he idealizes women only to lose interest when they return his affection in kind)? Is it really all as obvious as teaching each of them to let go of their disillusionment and personal failings and learn to appreciate themselves first so others may follow (in the wisdom of the film, “choosing to be content”)?
Working from a Black List script by Seth Reiss (The Menu), the film largely trafficks in bromides and dramatically contrived but reliably manipulative scenarios meant to leave a lump in your throat (e.g., David being teleported to a hospital in Ireland on the day he was born where he’s able to encourage his own scared-shitless father as a younger man). A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a therapy film in fantastical drag, forcing emotional catharsis through goopy yet clichéd scenarios that forgo any real specificity in search of trite universalities. How else to explain scenes like the one where David finds himself inhabiting the body of his own father so that he can console himself as a 15-years-old, bonding over playing Super Nintendo and telling his younger self what a “special boy” he is? Is it completely heartless to point out how incredibly onanistic this all is?
And about that: why exactly is David now in the body of someone else as though we were watching an episode of Quantum Leap? Why is the concept only introduced nearly 90 minutes into the film? For as linear and programmatic as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is, with each “unexpected” development called out in advance by the GPS or winkingly anticipated by the set dressing, the film often feels like it’s making itself up as it goes along. For reasons left entirely uninterrogated, the magical realism conceit occasionally exists outside the realm of the teleporting door gimmick, as when David and Sarah hike to the top of a ridge and find themselves looking down on the moon, expansive and glowing beneath them (to be fair, there’ll never be a more opportune venue for a first kiss). Sometimes they’re transported to a liminal rehearsal space that all but serves as a black box theater where they can act out any number of uncomfortable memories. Other times, Sarah and David inhabit the same memory, such as when they realize each of them broke up with their respective partners at the same cafe, with the whole thing playing like mixed-doubles couples therapy, allowing the actors to just blurt out the subtext. Yet for all the fanciful detours down memory lane, what’s missing here is any real sense of unexpected complication or even a hint that this all hasn’t been going according to a well-orchestrated plan set in motion by a higher power. Even David and Sarah’s customary, end-of-second-act blow-up, where they each elect to go their separate ways and return to their respective homes alone, is treated as an anticipated — nay, necessary — step on the characters’ journeys of personal growth and self-absolution.
What’s perhaps most dispiriting about the film is how this all feels recognizably in Koganada’s wheelhouse, with the video essayist-turned-filmmaker specializing in gentle mood pieces that place a premium on how we process memory and the value we instill in locations and objects from our past. For example, the characters in Columbus are constantly being framed in relation to how they engage with physical spaces, encouraging an interplay between the understated yet roiling drama in the foreground with severe-looking modernist architecture in the background; it’s a film light on conventional dramatic fireworks yet every frame reads like a painting. But with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the filmmaker seems thrown by the assignment and the need to set scenes against a series of diverse, digitally augmented backdrops that often find the actors performing in settings that have all the verisimilitude of a screensaver. Even the filmmaker’s gift for evocative shot composition abandons him here, especially as the action relocates to the front seat of a moving vehicle, cozy suburban homes, and rest stop Burger Kings (the film peaks, visually, with the staging of the early wedding scenes). Meanwhile, Robbie and Farrell are stuck in an endless cycle of running themselves down, reiterating what terrible people and selfish lovers they are, but such professed flaws rarely manifest in their behavior, past or present. It all becomes a bit “doth protest too much” and emphasizes how defanged the film is. When a word like “bold” is thrown around as much as it is by this film, it’s entirely fair for viewers to expect something considerably more than this.
DIRECTOR: Kogonada; CAST: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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