‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ is a magical journey to nowhere

Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell star in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Photo by Matt Kennedy There s a moment towards the end of Kogonada s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey where David Colin Farrell and Sarah Margot Robbie are sitting at a table across from their respective exes The exes are waiting for David and Sarah to explain why they broke up with them and not the canned answers they gave the first time around because this has all happened before but the truth After a long silence David absolutely says I ll go He hard launches into a monologue where he explains what his damage is in detail taking advantage of this fantastical opportunity to decisively be honest and say how he feels A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a series of I ll go moments that is to say a string of sequences where its two stars tell each other and the audience exactly how they feel about everything falling in love by way of therapy-speak in a film that barely delivers a surface-level explanation of the leap of faith that is falling in love The bare bones dully-framed characters feel more like faint impressions of people than people themselves and the script penned by Seth Reiss feels like a waste of both of its actors and Kogonada s strengths After a ships passing in the night interaction at a wedding David and Sarah link up the next day when they find out they both got their rental cars from the same obscure company Both cars contain a magical GPS yes you read that right that implores David and Sarah to take a big bold beautiful journey together traversing back in time through strange fantastical doorways that lead them to essential moments and places of their past They ll have to reckon with that past before they can forge a future together Boiled down to its essence A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is about the strategies in which we perform for other people the front that we put up when we re too afraid to truly let someone in It makes sense then that in particular options A Big Bold Beautiful Journey feels like an old-school MGM musical It s in the lineage of something like Brigadoon bright and colorful an earnest romantic fantasy that treats its magical elements with nothing but the utmost sincerity At first the film s staginess works quite well David s first interaction with the proprietor of the rental car company a quite funny if misplaced Phoebe Waller-Bridge is full of the problems that will continue to plague A Big Bold Beautiful Journey throughout including dialogue with a complete lack of subtext it s here that Waller-Bridge s character first tells David there are moments of truth in performance one of the movie s key themes and also one of the movie s key themes to be spoken out loud during the movie But at least here at the beginning Kogonada is able to match his visual style with the performative nature of the dialogue I m not an actor David says at one point as a spotlight suddenly descends upon him It might not be subtle but it s performative with a purpose Unfortunately Kogonada is unable to keep up with the stilted cloyingness of the dialogue for the rest of the film apart from one pivotal exception For the bulk part any spark that Kogonada is able to inject into the film putters out as soon as anyone starts talking In A Big Bold Beautiful Journey people speak to each other in vague terms the person who introduces David and Sarah tells them that they live in the same city what that city is called who s to say Characters give the impression of a deep inner life through dialogue alone They fall in love in the way that children might instead of full grown adults with years of emotional baggage They mostly tell each other the truth If they think the other person is lying they call it out instantly The person who is called out almost inevitably gives in There is nothing running under the surface no feelings for the audience to root out no subtleties to pick up on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is void of complexity not in the type of way that makes for a fun easy watch but rather in a way that can be mind-numbingly dull Robbie and Farrell both try to match the tone of the film but what they re appealed to do is devoid of what makes both of them absorbing performers including his puppy-dog petulance and her intensity and brashness There s no heat between them despite the fact that they are ostensibly in conflict with each other for the majority of the film s runtime During their climactic big blow-out fight the visual language is nothing more than a series of cuts between medium and close-up shots of their faces A car literally explodes at the end of this scene not really to underscore the fight but rather to remind the audience that this exchange has any heated emotion in the first place There is one sequence that exception mentioned earlier that is proof there is an fascinating movie hiding beneath the surface One of the doors David has to passage through takes him back to his high school on the night of the school musical forcing him to perform the lead role in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying Besides being one of the the bulk visually exciting moments in the film maybe Kogonada should direct a musical this sequence conclusively ultimately contains a bit of substance as David wrestles with his feelings for his teenage crush He s taken back to a fateful moment where he stopped performing and everything went wrong and slips back into habits he thought long abandoned at the drop of a hat For a moment it feels like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is at last getting at something But that door closes all too rapidly The post A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a magical journey to nowhere appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta