‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ is big, bold and sappy
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” — 2 stars
When you’ve made two small, exquisite movies that have delighted critics and won over discerning audiences, I guess you’ve earned the right to blow all that credit on a big-budget romantic fantasy. But, hoo boy, is “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” a gamble — a rom-com with the “com” replaced by metaphysical meanderings through a couple’s purple psychic memories.
Like many long-shot rolls of the dice, it’s a movie that sometimes cuts to the core of human feeling and sometimes has an audience cringing at its achingly whimsical pretensions. Depending on how you feel about such things, it will land on the knife-edge of kitsch or tumble off either side into powerful emotional truth or laughable corn.
The Korean American filmmaker who goes by the name Kogonada is the one throwing heart and soul and CGI landscapes at the screen. He previously made “Columbus” (2017), a delicate two-hander starring John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson and the architecture of Columbus, Indiana, and “After Yang” (2021), a terrific day-after-tomorrow drama about a family mourning its domestic robot. That film’s star, Colin Farrell, returns in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” as David, a handsome loner traveling from an unnamed city to a wedding in the countryside and forced at the last minute to rent a car from a very strange rental agency.
The agency is staffed by Kevin Kline (looking sweetly distracted) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (with a German accent), and they may be angels, I don’t know. David’s car has a magic GPS, voiced by Farrell’s “After Yang” co-star Jodie Turner-Smith, that sends him on a “big, bold, beautiful journey” along with Sarah (Margot Robbie), a woman he flirted with at the wedding. Sarah has also rented a car from the Very Strange Rental Agency, but it conveniently stalls, forcing the pair to journey together into all sorts of symbolic dramas and doorways to the past, none of which they find particularly unusual.
Some movie romances with supernatural gimmicks (see “The Time Traveler’s Wife” or “The Lake House”) make an effort to keep one foot in reality. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is braver and more foolhardy than that. When David and Sarah are guided to their first destination, it’s a door standing by itself in a verdant field; passed through, it leads to a coastal lighthouse with a Maxfield Parrish sunset, where the two are invited to pause and soak up the beauty of the moment.
Further doors will lead to David’s high school years, an art museum where Sarah often went with her late mother (Lily Rabe), a hospital, a diner where they confront their respective fears of intimacy, and other stages for psychological traumas and breakthroughs. Some of these scenes work marvelously, like a high school theater production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” with the adult David reinhabiting his teenage self, or a scene in which he comforts his father (Hamish Linklater) at a critical juncture in the older man’s life. Others feel like steps in a self-help manual.
Farrell and Robbie give the best performances they can, given that their characters are allegories rather than people. They bring movie-star charm and rueful wit to screenwriter Seth Reiss’ dialogue, which has an earnest snap but errs on the side of therapy-speak. (“You loved some version of me that’s not me”; “I’d rather feel nervous with you than nothing alone.”) They’re certainly great to look at, and the cinematography (Benjamin Loeb), production design (Katie Byron), costumes (Arjun Bhasin) and special effects (Jeremy Hays) all constitute eye candy of the first rank. The plaintive score is by Studio Ghibli stalwart Joe Hisaishi, his first for a Hollywood film.
But successful, believable drama is all about the subtext, and “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is primarily text, writ large and passionate and with its i’s dotted with hearts. If it’s refreshing for a movie to lead this sincerely with its chin, it’s just as impossible to not roll one’s eyes at the cheesier moments and on-the-nose soundtrack choices (“Let My Love Open the Door,” enough already).
Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.
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In theaters. Rated R for language. 108 minutes.