‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ Review: Kogonada’s Grounded Perspective Is at Odds with Flighty and Sentimental Metaphysical Romance [C]

The only thing more ridiculous than the title A Big Bold Beautiful Journey may be the fact that the title is said out loud in the film. Multiple times, in fact, as Colin Farrell’s David loads into his rental car with a retro-futuristic magical GPS that suddenly refers to him by name and asks him if he would like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey. It makes him repeat the phrase with emphasis when he agrees, and on the third run we watch from outside the car, unable to hear as he clearly adds in a “motherfucking” to the phrase when reading his lips. We then abruptly cut to the title card. Even more ridiculous than all of this, though, is that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey gets far closer to making a scene like this work than it ever should, given how absurd it sounds on paper. 

Because yes, much of Journey is exactly as sickeningly sweet and saccharine as you might expect from the poster of Farrell and Margot Robbie smiling at each other against the sky, holding pastel umbrellas. It’s just as rife with mushy sentiment as its premise of two lost souls road-tripping through the countryside with pit stops into literal doorways accessing their memories suggests. With its burrowing into psychological burdens by having the characters literally relive them on screen—combined with its Sundance-core ambience of hip cuteness and cursory inspirational philosophizing—the best analogy for the film may be that it’s like if Charlie Kaufman were the Daniels.

That’s all true, and yet director Kogonada, along with Farrell and Robbie, manage to locate nuggets of stylistic charm and emotional truth that often rise above what the script itself seeks to convey. In his first time directing someone else’s screenplay instead of his own, the placid tenderness of Kogonada’s Columbus and After Yang is often at odds with writer Seth Reiss’ quirkier material. Reiss, who previously co-wrote the tedious class satire The Menu, crafts a much more overtly whimsical affair than what Kogonada has previously put his name on.

Look no further than the film’s opening, in which we quickly learn that David is an emotionally unavailable loner attending a wedding by himself. Renting a car from The Car Rental Agency—a peculiar business situated in a sparse warehouse that seems to exist with one foot in and one foot out of reality, and featuring quite the funny roles for Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge—he unwittingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery. At the wedding, he has a meet-cute with Sarah (Robbie), followed by another the next day at a Burger King, where her car breaks down and David’s GPS instructs him to pick her up. Because it’s not just his own self-discovery at stake—David and Sarah are two sides of, if not the same coin, then very similar ones, sharing matching edges and defects. They’ll need each other to figure out what to make of this crazy thing we call life.

I’m being dismissive of this movie’s whole conceit, but this is the same movie where Farrell travels back to high school, where everyone sees him as a teenager, and has to perform a number in the school production of How To Get Ahead in Business Without Really Trying, which is the exact flavor of indie-movie whimsy that tends to grate. When “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes starts playing during a pivotal moment, you’ll begin to think this was scientifically engineered in a lab to impress unassuming film fest audiences from 15 years ago. 

And yet, there are quieter moments in Journey that manage to resonate more authentically, thanks to assured direction, a handsome visual style, and appealing lead performances. Kogonada reunites with After Yang cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, crafting a look not dissimilar to that film in its meticulous framing, but more alive in a story decidedly more romantic and less dour. The film is full of rich colors and simple yet elegant shot setups and camera movements, making it consistently pleasing to the eye. Attractive costuming by Arjun Bhasin (also returning from After Yang) adorns two beautiful movie stars portraying characters confronting their baggage and falling in love, bliss in their eyes. 

Farrell and Robbie are a bit of an odd pairing, and that may be the point: David carries the weary resignation of a man who sees little satisfaction in life, while Sarah, though similarly adrift, seems more willing to embrace its adventurous parts. “Stop trying to be charming,” Robbie says to Colin Farrell of all people, and yet his courting of Sarah does often feels like a put-on, even when the two genuinely begin to fall for each other. The screenplay desperately needs them to hit their emotional marks, but their relationship rests on an intentionally stagy foundation, the film continually circling back to the idea of living as a kind of performance.

Their characters are more interesting when confronting their respective traumas. Each performer, facing elements of their lives that have long since passed or been avoided, finds more direct pathos here than in the romance. Robbie, for instance, finds greater history and conviction in a single scene opposite her mother (Lily Rabe) than she’s able to generate across the entire runtime with her supposed main screen partner. That’s less a knock on the actors than on a script whose peripheral ideas prove more compelling than the narrative path it chooses.Which feels appropriate for a film that boasts plenty of technical proficiency and some stirring emotion tucked into its margins, but nonetheless can’t fully shake itself free of gooey mawkishness. As much as Kogonada’s more sobering instincts try to counteract the amplified sentimentality of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, sometimes you just can’t escape the overblown schmaltz of your title.

Grade: C

Sony Pictures will release A Big Bold Beautiful Journey only in theaters on September 19.