“Do you want to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey?”
It’s quite an ambitious promise that the premise of Kogonada’s new film, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, makes with the question posed to its two leads, played by Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. The new fantasy film directed by Kogonada and written by Seth Reiss, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is certainly beautiful, filled with striking and evocative images befitting the After Yang and Columbus filmmaker. But is it big? Kind of — the so-called journey whisks Farrell and Robbie’s David and Sarah away through moments in each other’s lives, past and present. Is it bold? Not quite — there’s something a little too familiar about how it dabbles in magical realism, recalling films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle with such breathless affection that they even got longtime Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi to score the movie. But there is one thing for sure about A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: it’s unapologetically, swooningly romantic.
The film begins with David (Farrell) trying to get to a friend’s wedding, when he finds his car towed. Led to a mysterious car rental agency, David is put through a bizarre “audition” process in which he is grilled about the performative nature of life by a German-accented cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Finally, he’s given the keys to a 1994 Saturn SL, which comes with a clunky, retro-looking GPS. Though at first the GPS takes him where he needs to go (with a few cheeky asides), it asks him the titular question as he despondently heads home, after meeting and failing to strike up a connection with Sarah (Robbie) at the wedding. And when he says yes, he finds himself running into Sarah on the road, driving the same car. They embark on the journey together, with the GPS leading them to a mysterious door standing in the middle of a field. As they step through the door, they realize this journey is made specifically for them to learn about each other’s deepest fears, secrets, and unfulfilled wishes.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a little bit of a unicorn of a movie. Seith Reiss’ script was featured on 2020’s Black List, and was quickly scooped up by Sony on the buzz that it was “one of the market’s hottest scripts.” It’s clear why the script was in such high demand: it’s a wonderfully imaginative and whimsical idea that feels like an ode to the beautiful little moments in life. As David and Sarah find new doors on their journey, they step into the key moments of their lives that defined them, and even find themselves reliving them — whether they be a musical they performed as a teenager, or a particularly bad break-up. The movie is at its most interesting (some might say boldest) when it forces David and Sarah to confront their worst moments and grapple with their flaws, in surreal sequences that veer into the abstract. But because Reiss’ script favors sentimentality, Kogonada’s more eclectic strengths start to feel boxed in.
This is the first time that Kogonada has directed a film that he didn’t also write, and as such, the director’s instincts often bump up against the sentimental nature of the script. The clear adulation that Kogonada has for the script, and the nature of it being featured on the renowned Black List, makes it feel like the director didn’t want to change it too much, creating a disconnect between the script’s broad sentimentality and the actual emotions on display. Kogonada is fantastic at subtle emotional inflections and deeply intimate exchanges, so when he has to go big like this, he struggles to translate the script’s cheesier ideas into something palatable. It’s clearest in the rather wooden dialogue that even talented actors like Farrell and Robbie struggle to make natural, and the vaguely sketched out personalities of David and Sarah. While Farrell is predictably charming and Robbie gives a tenderly vulnerable performance, their characters feel oddly underbaked for a Kogonada film, and it makes one wish that he had taken a firmer hand in punching up the script, or at least given them the warmth and nuance that all of his past characters have displayed.
While the film’s character dynamics are lacking, its visuals are not. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is inarguably gorgeous, with Kogonada putting all his energy into creating visually stunning vistas and ethereal images that tug at the fringes of your imagination. One particular sequence, in which David and Sarah find themselves looking at the Earth from above, taps into a sense of magical whimsy that few live-action movies do. Indeed, the closest equivalent to A Big Bold Beautiful Journey are the works of anime filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki or Makoto Shinkai, which Kogonada painstakingly evokes, even getting longtime Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi to score the movie.
And while A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s evocation of anime films like this are pleasingly lovely, the film feels at its most exciting when Kogonada embraces a full-fledged theatricality that he’s never displayed before — one such scene includes Farrell enthusiastically performing the opening number to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in full Broadway regalia. Other times, when the film transforms into a black-box theater performance with just David and Sarah, it becomes clear that Kogonada is experimenting with a new, bolder style that he’s not quite adept at, but is quickly evolving with. It’s more exciting to think of how Kogonada will use these new tools in future films than to ponder how they don’t quite work in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
Still, it’s hard to dislike a film as earnest and romantic as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — not to mention one as loaded with so many stunningly gorgeous images. It may not be as big or bold as it imagines itself to be, but it’s certainly full of a sense of imagination and whimsy that you don’t find in many — or really any — movies these days.
