A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

A Long, Excruciating, Painful Mess, should be the true title of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the newest film from Kogonada, the filmmaker behind Columbia and After Yang. Neither of those films prepares one for the utter failure that is this work. Despite a cast with Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as the leads, this film fails to ignite on any level. A ponderous, humorless, indulgent and off-putting debacle, this makes the pacing of Meet Joe Black seem like a day at the racetrack.

Courtesy Sony

The film is about two people, David and Sarah, who meet at a wedding, discover they live in the same city and, guided by a GPS system from the cars they both mysteriously got from a shadowy outfit known as The Car Rental Place, begin the Big Bold Beautiful Journey of the title, and yet you will almost instantly not care. Not only are the characters bland and unlikable, but we have seen what they wanted to do here, done before and done far better. George Miller’s recent Three Thousand Years of Longing and Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, for instance, both covered the ground this appears to want to tread.

The difference is, those were filled with characters and staging, with performances and commitments from cast and crew, that elevated the project. It is rare to see a film where you have all the geometry and none of the chemistry. It would be a shame if we do not, as viewers, get to see Farrell and Robbie again, because the reason they do not work here is down entirely to forces beyond their control. They are fully committed and totally professional.

Courtesy Sony

What is it about this film that is so wrong? It would be hard to find just one thing, but when you have a film that mistakes speeches about emotion for emotion itself, and talking about loss and love, about issues of trust, instead of just showing it, and earning the investment of the audience, there are problems. It is a problem because it is a cheat. This feels like what a first-year film student might come up with if they were given a large budget and a fantastic cast, because there is little of the wisdom that comes with age. We are mostly presented with excuses and a series of “yes/no” dialogue in which characters say a lot of words without expressing anything beyond surface denials and affirmations.

The magical realism of the film, for instance, is, rightly, never explained, but it is also never placed into context nor are viewers given any satisfying thematic reasons for why the story unfolded as it did. When a story adds in wrinkles of the unusual, such as in this film, those wrinkles need to serve a purpose beyond filler. Nothing in this film requires the more unusual aspects and, frankly, those are the worst bits, which, frustratingly, leads to some good moments which could have been arrived at differently.

Courtesy Sony

If the film is about confronting your past, it does so in such an oblique way that it loses much of its coherency. Unlike the Before Trilogy, which adeptly examines time, love and commitment, this film seeks to run around the same issues, never fully or convincingly laying out either a thesis or a real conflict. Indeed, there are going to be times where you will ask the screen “how about you two just realize you are both damaged people with fears that you are unable to overcome and not try hurting the other?” In no romantic drama, should you ever be actively rooting for the couple to not get together just to save yourself, and them, the agony of each other’s company. Not recommended, at all.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is now playing in theaters.