Henry O'Brien
At the end of director Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, we hear the song “Let My Love Open the Door.” The tune, originally by Pete Townshend, undeniably serves as the thesis for the mononymous filmmaker behind great recent works like After Yang and Columbus. His film urges not just Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie’s characters to embrace a flawed romance, but also for viewers to accept these classical Hollywood modes of storytelling, as they can help us answer some of the great curiosities of life.
The problem with his plea is that Kogonada forms a world that never captures the wonder of falling in love or looking back on past mistakes. The fantasy that he is looking for feels unimaginative, with some shockingly weightless images that cut against his sterling reputation for visuals, designs and architecture. For a director whose works lean into sentimentality in the face of a bleak and uncertain world, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey unfortunately pushes Kogonada into saccharine territory.
The movie starts with 30-40-something David (Farrell) chatting with his parents about how he likes to be alone, before using a car from a mysterious rental car company (run by Kevin Kline and an oddly German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge) to go to a wedding. There, he encounters Sarah (Robbie), another person who has been around the block in terms of relationships. The so-called conflict in the story becomes simple. David has gotten a divorce, and Sarah runs away from commitment.
In short, they both feel pessimistic about love, and they both know it. But through the voice of a GPS (Jodie Turner-Smith) in their rented 1994 Saturn, the two learn to love on a big, bold, beautiful journey through each of their pasts, full of love, care, embarrassment and heartbreak. If only the movie itself were actually big, bold or beautiful.
As legendary horror writer Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Kogonada and screenwriter Seth Reiss (an Upright Citizens Brigade comedy veteran who was one of the scribes behind 2022’s The Menu) took this quote from a fictional character, less so as a joke and more so as a challenge for their film. Much of the dialogue throughout this small, timid, and downright ugly journey feels as though they asked ChatGPT to make the most blunt dialogue possible. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola’s wonderful Megalopolis, which dropped a nuclear bomb on the very notion of subtext, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey lacks a specificity or eccentricity for David and Sarah’s relationship. This results in a filmmaking effort that becomes stunted in the worst ways possible.
Kogonada’s film is acting from a very particular wavelength and it would make sense for folks nearing their middle-age to have more of a soft spot for this kind of picture. He pulls no punches on how the characters have experienced disappointment. Even as the traumatic backstories that unfold feel fully contrived, there can be a level of relatability to their past misfortunes in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, especially for people who have had enough time on this planet to have their hearts repeatedly broken.
But Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, two actors who generally perform outside of romantic dramas, have robotic chemistry together. Whether or not this was intentional—think of the mechanical conversations in After Yang—does not change the fact that the two never feel in sync or show any true or deep romance toward each other, which makes the platitudes about love feel all the more exhausting. It’s not much of a spoiler to say David and Sarah fall for each other (the movie is explicit in the story beats it wants to follow), but the relationship never comes off as convincing.
The more discouraging element of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, however, comes from the cinematography. Through his first two films, Kogonada distinguished himself for forming worlds that felt distinct and rich. After Yang posits a technology-environment infused world that stifles connections between humans, while Columbus uses negative space in the way Yasujiro Ozu would, making the modernist architecture of the titular town emote in a way.
But, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, with all the metamodern tendencies of pointing out that it is a movie and emphasis on showing the wonder and whimsy behind love, falls short. Even as Kogonada tries to capture the grand scope of the world and David and Sarah’s lives, nothing feels very grand, in an inversion that is only clever because the film says so. Meanwhile, the color palette sticks out to seemingly be included on a film Instagram account that focuses on the color behind people’s favorite movies.
The only fantastical and whimsical element of Kogonada’s film comes from composer Joe Hisashi, himself the genius behind the score music in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It was undoubtedly a fantastic choice on the part of Kogonada to include the composer behind some of the most wonderful and childlike scores imaginable (Spirited Away, Ponyo, etc.)
The rest of the film, however, doesn’t capture anything profound about romantic relationships. There’s no wonder in the simplicity of it all, simply because the movie tries so desperately hard to put this relationship between David and Sarah in the grandest terms. The incoherence muddies the film, which becomes a shocking dud for such a respected director as Kogonada. Maybe shrinking down the scale could bring him back to finding the beauty in this world, because bigger, bolder and more beautiful doesn’t necessarily mean better.
