Directed by: Kogonada
Distributed by: Sony Pictures
Written by Anna Harrison
50/100
When I was twelve, I went to see “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” on Broadway, and then again the next year. I was at the peak of my “Harry Potter” phase, somewhat obsessed with Daniel Radcliffe (still am, in all fairness), and it was only the second or third musical on Broadway I had ever seen, so I thought it was the pinnacle of the art form. “Brotherhood of Man” was on loop in my house, and I even had dreams of convincing my high school theater teacher to direct it my senior year so I could play Hedy LaRue, which did not work out. So imagine my great joy when, a quarter of the way through Kogonada’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” Colin Farrell struts on stage in a window washer outfit and begins to sing the opening number.
Then, if you will, imagine my great disappointment when the movie went downhill from there… not that things were that great to begin with. It seems that the commitment issues plaguing singles David (Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) apply to the movie, too: our story begins with David renting a car and driving to his friends’ wedding, where he meets Sarah, and there it becomes apparent that “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” has no idea how to sell, well, it’s big, bold, beautiful journey.
Soon enough, the rental car’s GPS begins talking to David, roping him into a road trip with Sarah, who turned out to have also rented a car from the same company. As they traverse the hills of California, the pair run into various doors that seem to break the space-time continuum and lead to various important moments in their lives: a museum visit after Sarah’s mother dies, David’s leading man debut in his high school musical. Kogonada and his cinematographer Benjamin Loeb (reunited after the excellent “After Yang”) infuse everything with warmly saturated colors, and the movie never looks less than bold and beautiful, and yet Seth Reiss’ script leaves everything else floundering. Do David and Sarah react to the doors the way you and I would (presumably with suspicion and a police report)? Are they aware, on some level, that they are in a story and need to let it play out? Is this some sort of Brechtian rumination on relationships where the characters talk in bizarre ways and keep the audience at a distance?
Apparently, it’s all of those things and none of them. David and Sarah make half-hearted jokes about the doors, and still earnestly interact with them without an ounce of suspicion. Their introductory dialogue is so stilted that I thought it was an intentional affect, but as the movie wore on, I realized I was giving Reiss too much benefit of the doubt. Farrell, used to working with the oft-strange dialogue of directors and writers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Martin McDonagh, gives something close to a compelling performance, but Robbie is left totally adrift. It doesn’t help that Sarah is the “enlightened” man’s idea of a complex female character, by which I mean she is a manic pixie dream girl, only this time with more damage. She loves to eat burgers; she tells David in their first real conversation that she will break his heart and then, in nearly the same breath, asks him to marry her; she has issues in her relationships with men because her dad was shitty. She wears a jaunty little hat just like this one and does nothing except talk about how terribly she will treat David if they get together—which, of course, they will. She is, in short, a handful of tropes that so-called feminist men from Silver Lake and Brooklyn love, but she is not a real character.
By the time David tells Sarah that he knows “everything” about her, even the parts she tries to hide, I had to laugh. “Everything” about her could fit in a teaspoon, and the traits that David describes are not revelatory but rather things that have been very explicitly spelled out in the prior scenes for us, sometimes even by Sarah herself. Of course, it doesn’t help that Farrell and Robbie—despite looking beautiful as ever—have not even an ounce of chemistry. Had sparks flown, then perhaps the beautiful imagery and score courtesy of the legendary Joe Hisaishi could have made up for the awkward and obvious script. With a subtler pen, this could have been a moving and thoughtful dissertation on commitment and contentment; what we are left with is certainly big and certainly bold, for who makes original movies with such an out-there concept like this any more, and it’s certainly beautiful to look at, but never amounts to much of anything.
Still, I must remember the wise words of one J. Pierrepont Finch: “Remember, mediocrity is not a mortal sin.” It’s just a bit boring.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” Trailer
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