I’m not sure what I expected with this one. And I’m still not 100 percent sure what the hell I just sat through.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey comes to us from screenwriter Seth Reiss, the erstwhile Seth Meyers late-night writer who went on to co-write freaking The Menu. In the director’s chair is Kogonada, an up-and-coming Korean filmmaker who started out as a video essayist with a specialty in analyzing filmmaking technique. But of course the only two names anyone knows or cares about are Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, and the film was heavily made and marketed as a vehicle for them.
Respectively, Farrell and Robbie play David and Sarah, both perpetually single and insistent that they’re perfectly fine living on their own. I might add that these two strangers both live in the same unnamed city, they’re both on their way to the same wedding, and they both rent a car from the same eccentric unnamed “Car Rental Agency”.
Speaking of which, “The Car Rental Agency” only has a ’94 Saturn on offer, the only two employees are played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and freaking Kevin Kline, Waller-Bridge’s character has a habit of dropping random F-bombs, and they’re both oddly aggressive about including a GPS unit with the rental.
The GPS unit (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) — which has a HAL 9000 eye on it for whatever bewildering reason — randomly asks David and Sarah if they want to go on a Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey. The GPS proceeds to repeat the question until they both loudly answer in the affirmative. The GPS proceeds to direct David and Sarah through time and space, making them relive their past joys and traumas until they both grow into better people and a loving couple.
There are so many obvious problems here, I don’t even know where to start.
Maybe it’ll help to compare/contrast with a classic story that has a similar premise: “A Christmas Carol”. That was another story about a protagonist who had virtually zero agency in his own story, forcefully dragged on a fantastic adventure to relive his past until he learns how to be a better person. Why does that story work and this one doesn’t?
To start with, “A Christmas Carol” begins by going to great lengths in portraying all the many ways and degrees that Scrooge is an irredeemable bastard. Not only is he miserable, but he’s doing his level best to make everybody else miserable for his own comfort and profit. Even better, “A Christmas Carol” shows how Scrooge is perceived in the present and what could happen in the future if he doesn’t change his ways. Thus, even though Scrooge doesn’t have any real power to affect anything in the course of the plot, the story remains compelling because we know what will happen to him and the city around him if he doesn’t reform. In other words, the Dickens story has palpable stakes.
The Kogonada picture has none of that. The first act does nothing to show that David and Sarah are miserable people, certainly not to the extent that literal divine intervention is necessary to protect their friends and loved ones. Furthermore, because we only go to their past — never to their present or future — there’s no sense of how things are for them now or what could potentially be avoided. There are no stakes here whatsoever. And because there’s no plausible way for David and Sarah to resist the plot and stay as they are, the plot glides along rails to a perfectly predictable ending with no real shocks or surprises along the way.
…Okay, there’s one incident involving a random deer, but that’s quickly over and effortlessly settled like it never happened. Barely an inconvenience.
Moreover, while the Christmas Ghosts are vague in the specifics of their methods and motivations, their actions follow clearly-defined rules. Scrooge was only seeing echoes from a detached perspective, unable to directly interact with anything he saw or heard. Compare that to Journey, which is all over the place. Sometimes the characters are taking the place of their younger selves, sometimes they’re taking someone else’s place. Sometimes, they’re taking part in events that never actually happened! And all throughout the runtime, they are directly talking and listening and physically interacting with other people. Is any of this really happening? Are they rewriting past events? What the hell is going on?!
See, the Christmas Ghosts had a clearly defined purpose. We knew they were there to reform Scrooge, and we saw what methods they had at their disposal to try and make that happen. Contrast that with this GPS, who’s using unknowable methods toward an inexplicable end. This entire plot is being driven forward by an omniscient machine with powers over time and space, so impossibly powerful that our lead characters are powerless to resist it, and there’s no indication of how or why any of this is happening. Sure, the GPS is apparently trying to connect David and Sarah with the realization that the both of them are soul mates and better off together. But again, WHY?!
Yes, Farrell and Robbie are both magnificent talents, and they’re both doing their damnedest to elevate this script. It’s not working. The two of them have so little agency in the plot, so little motivation to reform or develop, and so little in the way of personality that it’s simply not enough. Hell, there are vast stretches of the movie in which Farrell and Robbie only register as themselves reading a script, the characters are that freaking thin.
I genuinely like what the filmmakers were trying to do with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, but they were simply not equal to the task of creating a whimsical romantic fantasy about human connection and existential themes. Sure, the visuals are there, the casting is rock-solid, even the basic premise isn’t bad. But the tone is all over the place, the worldbuilding is garbage, and we’re told literally everything about the main characters except for anything that would motivate the plot.
Worst of all, the film makes repeated use of a method in which the characters are aggressively browbeaten into doing what the plot demands of them. It’s nowhere near as charming or whimsical as the filmmakers seem to think it is. It’s just annoying and obnoxious, for the characters and the audience both.
Such a damn heartbreaking disappointment. Hard pass.