Two lonely hearts from the big city find each other through an improbably contrived trip in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, opening in Prague cinemas this weekend after debuting stateside last week. This small, delicate, but truly beautifully-filmed romance can best be described as ‘fanciful bullshit,’ and will rightly be rejected by discriminating audiences seeking sensible entertainment. But for some out there, it will resonate on the same level as an Amélie or perhaps Joe Versus the Volcano, and earn the type of adoration its protagonists so desperately seek.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has a lot to like, led by two charismatic performances from Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, who could effortlessly maintain our interest by cluelessly wandering around onscreen; that’s a good thing, as that’s what they’ll be doing for most of this movie. But the film is also gorgeously mounted by director Kogonada, with nearly every frame of Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography so pretty you could hang it on a wall. And it’s backed by a wonderfully evocative soft jazz score by Joe Hisaishi, who lends the movie the same kind of bittersweet feel he brought to his work for Studio Ghibli.
If only the screenplay, by Seth Reiss (The Menu), gave us something that we could grasp; alas, the entirety of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is so elusive that every step of the adventure confounds. Questions like, ‘What’s going on?’, ‘Why are they doing that?’, and ‘Where are we?’ are continually left unanswered. At no point do we believe in any kind of reality here, even if only a fictional reality in the world of the film.
The stage is set from the very first scene, when downtown dweller David (Farrell), on his way solo to a friend’s wedding, finds a boot on his car. This should be a 15-minute inconvenience (where the movie was filmed in L.A., anyway—the exact setting is not specified) but David decides to rent a car, and instead of calling Hertz or Enterprise—heck, they’d pick him up—he calls the number for The Car Rental Company, from a piece of printer paper taped to wall in front of his car.
The Car Rental Company is an expansive, underlit studio stage, accessed through a tricky back-alley door, with a single customer service desk manned by characters played by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose constant stream of f-bombs are entirely out of tune with the rest of the movie. They have only two cars, and both of them are a 1994 Saturn SL. They interview David as if he’s an actor auditioning for a gig, and insist he takes the GPS add-on.
Soon enough, David hooks up with Sarah (Robbie)—who also attends the wedding solo, and has rented the other Saturn—and the two of them begin blindly following their talking GPS. It leads them on the titular journey, which consists of driving around in search of mysterious doors in the middle of forests and deserts that take them back to formative memories from their own lives; these include some genuinely touching scenes between David and his parents (played by Hamish Linklater and Jennifer Grant), Sarah and her mother (Lily Rabe), and old lovers (Sarah Gadon and Billy Magnussen).
And maybe by coming to terms with their own pasts and personal issues, these two characters can finally resolve what’s been preventing them from connecting with previous partners, and embark on a new romance together. Going by the chemistry between Farrell and Robbie, we’d certainly like them to. Maybe the real big bold beautiful journey was the personal growth we made along the way.
There’s just one problem in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. All that subtext is the literal text of the movie. These characters aren’t metaphorically coming to terms with themselves; they’re doing it literally, in very artificial fashion, in scene after scene. On the surface level, there simply isn’t a larger story here that would drive the events of the movie.
This kind of wistful nonsense can work. But we need to buy into these protagonists, and have them serve as our surrogate while experiencing this incredible journey. Aren’t these magical doors, like, amazing fantasy artifacts? Apparently not, as David and Sarah never question their reality. Aren’t they angry, or confused, that The Car Rental Company seems to know so much about them? Nah. Don’t they want to escape this nightmare of reliving past trauma? No—they blindly walk through door after door without question.
The obvious comparison here is Groundhog Day, or Palm Springs, with these characters trapped in a sci-fi plot device that cannot be rationally understood. But imagine if, instead of trying to get out of the time loop throughout the movie, the characters consciously choose to remain inside of it. And instead of subconsciously coming to terms with themselves throughout the movie, they literally address their own flaws and ponder how to overcome them in scene after scene.
While A Big Bold Beautiful Journey never works on a rational level, its emotional resonance is undeniable; there are scenes here that will have even the harshest cynics tearing up. And the technical presentation is gorgeous, with Hisaishi’s score, in particular, deserving of year-end accolades. For viewers willing to embrace the film’s whimsical, dreamlike logic, against all common sense, it offers a memorable, moving, and beautiful journey indeed.
