At a glance, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey seems like the kind of movie it’d be easy to fall in love with. A fantastical romance about two broken-hearted lovers who seem destined to be together, the film stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, two Academy Award-nominated actors, who are almost criminally hot. Plus, from the looks of the trailers and posters, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is full of color and whimsy. What’s not to love?
Well, while the film does embrace a vivid palette, big moments of break-ups, birth, death, and even the unique joy of high school theater, there’s a devoted remoteness to its approach. Helmed by critically heralded director Kogonada (After Yang, Columbus), A Big Beautiful Journey offers a setup that seems the stuff of American mainstream movie romance. But shortly after its enchantingly quirky first act, the script by Seth Reiss (The Regime, The Menu) veers into a cerebral space that feels frustratingly disconnected from earnest emotion.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey starts off strong with Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment
On the day of a friend’s nuptials, David (Farrell) is planning to drive a ways out of the city to the rural venue. However, his car tires have been unexpectedly booted, so he follows the advice of a fatefully positioned flyer to a remote location, where a car rental service is promised. While the first sequence feels like it could be set in the streets of New York City, where David emerges from a picturesque brownstone with a bright blue door and rushes down a bustling sidewalk, the very next setting is an alleyway so wide and clean it only exists in the movie-version of Manhattan. Already, Kogonada is stepping away from our frustrating reality (getting your car booted without warning) and into romantic fantasy.
However, this car rental place is not quaint or charming. It’s Broad City-bizarre. After a comically cryptic exchange over a doorbell intercom, David enters the building to find a massive, mostly empty warehouse. All that lies inside are two cars and two people sitting at a card table, waiting for him to approach. One is a cheerful woman, who speaks with a fitful German accent and relishes using the word “fuck.” Naturally, this is Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame. At her side, Kevin Kline is her foil, soft-spoken and mellow, where she is radiantly energetic. Together, they convince David to rent a car and spring for the GPS, in case his phone “craps out.” They are strangely insistent on this point.
Within this setup, there’s the sense of a play production. The vacuous space with two quirky characters in it, speaking of simple things like cell phone signals and doors, but with an intensity that suggests this is all metaphor. They are clearly the fateful figures launching this Journey. There’s a beguiling zaniness to this section, including a small prop detail: a headshot of Farrell, where he’s smiling broadly, with his fist planted firmly under his jaw, like how an overeager child might pose for a headshot. Naturally David says he’s never seen that photo before, another sign that something odd but wonderful is going on here. Sadly, where A Bold Beautiful Journey goes from here does not maintain or even recapture this energy, wildness, or sense of promise.
Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie are committed, but underwhelming in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
Credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment
For my money, Farrell’s one of the best actors of his generation, turning in darkly comic performances with In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, gritty pathos in The Penguin, radiant yearning in The Lobster, and seething rage in The Beguiled. In A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, however, Farrell hits a wall when it comes to Robbie.
In the car alone, there’s an ache in his voice and yearning in his eyes as he considers the roads less traveled, which the pleasant yet persistent GPS (Jodie Turner-Smith) will direct him towards. Yet as the film becomes about David and Sarah (Robbie) taking a road trip that drives them to scenic locations, where doors from their past will allow them to bring a guest to their personal highs and lows, the film becomes emotionally vague.
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At the wedding, David (in a dashing blue suit) meets Sarah in a red-striped silk pantsuit that resembles fancy pajamas. (They will stick strictly to these colors, no matter their outfits). They swiftly learn that he is from uptown and she is from downtown, suggesting a difference in attitude that’s reflected by their takes on formalwear. He’s reserved and polite; she’s a free-spirit who will admit she’s cheated in every relationship in one breath then propose marriage in the next.
These are both very charismatic actors, and yet this flirtation — and all those that follow — fell flat for me. Perhaps it’s the script by Reiss, who writes characters with the erudite edge of a New Yorker cartoon. David and Sarah aren’t defined by what they do for a living or their friends (despite meeting at a friend’s wedding). They begin simply as a man in blue and a woman in red, with the personality you might extrapolate from there.
Both will pontificate about why they are the way they are, blaming their parents or their own bad habits. Then jaunts into the beautiful spaces they love — a lighthouse, an art museum after hours — aim to evoke depth. But it feels superficial, especially as they pontificate things like “I’m meant to be alone” and that telling a kid he’s “special” does more harm than good. They feel less like faded sketches of failed lovers, leaving me yearning for something more.
Kogonada paints a restrained romance.
The concept of walking a prospective lover through your emotional baggage through a Being John Malkovich-like series of doors is a promising beginning. However, the places these doors lead are not all that surprising or compelling. Instead, they play into clichés of beauty, childhood trauma, and rom-com breakups. If the film had a rollicking pace, perhaps such tropes could be overlooked. But tangled in its pretentious pronouncements about love, regret, and forgiveness, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey feels astoundingly long, even though its runtime is under two hours.
Within the film, characters discuss the necessity to “act” — meaning pretend — to reach a place of truth. And perhaps that idea of performance is why Farrell and Robbie create characters that feel thin reflections of ideas over flesh-and-blood people. Farrell had previously starred in Kogonada’s After Yang, a drama about grief that embraces poetry over big shows of emotion. This approach didn’t work for me then, as I wrote in admiration for his approach, but confessed in my review, “I am not on Kogonada’s wavelength.”
The director’s take on grief did not connect to mine then, nor does his take on romantic love connect to mine now. It’s not even a matter of disagreement, but that I can’t feel the emotions that might live within his poetry.
I certainly didn’t expect a paint-by-numbers romance from Kogonada, yet I was surprised to find myself so numb to the central story. Farrell and Robbie are actors who boast incredible screen presence, and yet their chemistry here is tepid. They’re actors who’ve flung themselves into hours of prosthetics, high-concept comedies, and polarizing cinematic endeavors. But here, their portraits of people, yearning for love but afraid of being hurt, feel frustratingly shallow, when they could feel radiant or profound.
Simply put, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey felt neither big, bold, or beautiful. Its journey is winding. Its message is earnest, and yet I was unmoved, even bored.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey opens in theaters Sept. 19.