Magical realism, like love, requires a leap of faith.
It’s unlikely to make sense, for example, to see a lone door in the middle of a field that transports someone to a moment in their past when they were at their most closed-hearted. The strangeness is the point. Sometimes, the intangible can lead to profound realizations about oneself that the tangible can’t because of its roots in reality. However, surrendering to magical realism isn’t a one-way exchange. A film speaking that language needs the right words and proper syntax for it to resonate fully.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a film where that need is paramount to its successes and struggles. We embark on the titular journey with David (Colin Farrell), a man who rents a car with magical GPS to take him to a friend’s wedding. There, he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), who rented the same car as him. Both are unlucky in love and stuck in emotional stasis, borne from past disappointments and losses. When their magical cars offer them the opportunity to shatter the monotony of their lives, they jump at it. The car sends them on a road trip through their messy, complicated, painful pasts, everything from David getting his heart broken for the first time in high school to Sarah grappling with her mother’s death. The question is, will this big, bold, beautiful journey offer a path beyond mutual pain so they can learn to love again?
That certainly seems to be the intent. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey isn’t coy about its blissfully romantic ambitions. To achieve it, Kogonada leans heavily on magical realism, creating a world that isn’t especially interested in explaining the charmingly bizarre and unrealistic. David and Sarah may be skeptical about love and themselves, but they aren’t skeptical about their strange new circumstances. They are refreshingly open to everything, from the car rental company led by a sprightly Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge to their jaunts into their checkered pasts. There should be some cognitive dissonance, but it works because it discourages us from poking holes in the film’s logic. If David and Sarah seem relatively nonplussed by singing and dancing in David’s high school musical, why can’t we?
Instead of playing CinemaSins, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey invites us to immerse ourselves in Kogonada’s whimsical atmosphere, which reinforces that rejection of cynicism. Bright-eyed optimism permeates the film, enhanced by Joe Hisaishi’s firm but flighty score, and sharpened by Benjamin Loeb’s beautiful cinematography. Loeb and Kogonada compose genuinely beautiful frames that feel designed to crack through the hardest shells in the audience. Arguably the most beautiful shot centers on the rain-soaked road that Sarah and David are about to take, with the orange sunlight reflecting off the puddles and contrasting the weather-slicked blues. The shot makes you believe in David and Sarah’s journey and its potential without a single word shared between them. Other scenes are more explicit in their intent, like the tentative couple kissing with planet Earth behind them, but its subtle elegance holds it back from encouraging cynicism.
Unfortunately, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s script lacks Loeb, Hisaishi, and Kogonada’s elegance. In fact, Seith Reiss’s screenplay is cumbersome and laborious, seemingly built to quash whatever chances David and Sarah have as a couple before they even start on their journey. Their first interaction at the wedding is downright uncomfortable. “Stop trying to be charming,” Sarah tells David as they stand outside the reception, even though David has said nothing that could be described as such. “You seem smarter than that,” David replies to one of Sarah’s strangely probing questions, which should’ve marked the end of that conversation. While the ice melts some as the film continues, the script is still riddled with off-putting reparté and empty platitudes about life and love that would embarrass a Hallmark card. It’s trying too hard to be hard, which is ironic since almost everything else feels so effortless.
Almost everything.
The script’s biggest victims are its stars, Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. The film essentially transforms two charismatic actors into flat, manic pixie dream versions of themselves. Robbie falters as Manic Pixie Dream Margot, her natural sparkle dulled by repetitive lines about Sarah hurting David that offer Robbie very few opportunities for variance. Farrell does better as Manic Pixie Dream Colin, likely because of his familiarity with Kogonada through their work together on the brilliant After Yang. Kogonada knows how to capture Farrell, and that allows Farrell to fully embody David’s slow but steadily growing optimism and trust in love. As for Farrell and Robbie together, their chemistry is spotty at best. They are most engaging when they aren’t speaking, while the dialogue nearly snuffs out their romantic sparks. (It calls to mind how Ghosted’s script destroyed Chris Evans and Ana de Armas’s chemistry.)
It isn’t hard to believe that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey wants to be that for its romance-starved audience. Kogonada indeed strives for it, and he just about ekes out a success, thanks to some, frankly, Herculean heavy lifting. He’s why the film can claim to be beautiful, because it very much is. As for the other adjectives, the lumbering screenplay keeps the movie from being big or bold. While not the failure that a 1 out of 3 score might suggest, you can’t help but feel disappointed in what could’ve been. After all, no one wants their leap of faith to leave them crushed.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is currently playing exclusively in theaters courtesy of Sony Pictures.
While not the failure that a 1 out of 3 score might suggest, you can’t help but feel disappointed in what could’ve been. After all, no one wants their leap of faith to leave them crushed.
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GVN Rating
A late-stage millennial lover of most things related to pop culture. Becomes irrationally irritated by Oscar predictions that don’t come true.
