A Big Bold Beautiful Journey puts a magical realist spin on the midlife crisis. That’s a literal spin: This is a road trip movie, wherein two strangers thrust together revisit, at the prodding of a pushy GPS, crucial moments in their individual timelines. They have names – he’s David (Farrell), she’s Sarah (Robbie), they meet at a wedding, he’s giving her a ride home – but they might as well be Man and Woman. Or, more aptly, Boy and Girl, because the point of this road trip is to excavate their defining childhood traumas in order – to put it crudely – to unfuck themselves enough as adults to have a shot at a functioning relationship.
The film itself would never dream of such crudeness. (Well, Phoebe Waller-Bridge almost singlehandedly earns its R rating for the number of f-bombs she deploys in her limited screentime, but she’s such an imp, it plays charmingly.) Heart pinned emphatically to its sleeve, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is all about the uplift, signaled top-down from its fulsome title and telegraphed at every point that life is, indeed, a highway, and we use turn signals and polite road etiquette religiously here.
An everything-and-the-kitchen-sink kind of romance, it’s an odd followup for screenwriter Seth Reiss, who co-wrote 2020’s deliciously knives-out horror The Menu. There’s undeniable ingenuity in Reiss’ plot invention, with the road trip and its detours into the past mimicking the way new relationships develop, from meet-cute to the trading of practiced anecdotes until you finally start opening up about the gnarlier stuff of dead parents and past relationship damage. Only instead of sharing their secrets over dinner or post-coital cuddles, David and Sarah enter, together, into their separate pasts through doorways speckled along the roadside, stepping into a kind of living history that they can interact with and comment on. The highlight is a comically nightmarish four-way couples therapy session – there’s welcome bite there – but the film more often favors banality.
Banal is not a word I would have thought to associate with Kogonada, who wrote, directed, and edited his first two features, the delicately shaded, visually striking arthouse favorites Columbus and After Yang (the latter his first team-up with Farrell). Strictly directing here, Kogonada injects visual interest throughout, but I wonder if that compartmentalization of job duties has something to do with why the film feels so stilted. Even as we plumb into David and Sarah’s pasts, the effect is more generic than specific, as when they conclude a moment of vulnerability with a polite tidiness you might expect from one of After Yang’s android helpers: “Thank you for sharing that with me.” “Thank you for letting me.” This is the stuff of great love?
Would different leads have sold the love story more effectively? Farrell and Robbie, two actors I like very much, have a chemistry I’d call cordial at best. The laws of movie star attraction dictate that two people this dazzling must be in a love story, but behind another door is an arguably more interesting picture where David and Sarah are just each other’s traveling companions, not the final destination. The questions being probed here about how to be vulnerable, what it takes to connect – y’know, the big stuff – aren’t exclusive to romance, after all. And I so admired the movie for having the daring and openheartedness to try to tackle the big stuff. I just wish I liked it more.
