Ticketworthy! - A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Making a movie for the sake of the art itself is often admirable. A brilliant writer teamed with a visionary director can craft a living painting or put a mesmerizing ballet on a movie screen. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Big Fish come to mind. The story of those films is more a framing device that the filmmakers use to explore their themes and play with the audience’s emotions. That seems to have been the intention with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. It wants to be those movies, badly. It isn’t.

It’s difficult to break down the actual plot of the film, as it drifts between metaphor and set pieces which clearly aren’t meant to be real, so what is and isn’t really happening is a bit murky. On a surface level, it follows David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie). The two meet at a wedding and hit it off, despite both having emotional baggage that makes them nervous to start a relationship. Thanks to some shenanigans from a possibly magical GPS, the film doesn’t care to explain, they wind up driving together to a series of random doors that lead to emotional moments from their pasts. The pair face these moments together, trying to learn to overcome their own issues and each other’s.

While there are certainly worse frames to build a narrative into, that’s really all it is. It’s just a frame. The story has no meat to it, no emotional connection or stakes. Other than involving one of the two leads, each door and scene has basically nothing to do with any of the others. They also don’t really have much to do with the characters’ actual problems. Sarah is bad at being faithful in relationships, but none of her doors lead to any explanation of why. David is a hopeless romantic, more in love with the chase than his actual partners. However, we see that in action maybe once, and he’s a teenager at the time. By the end of the film, we’re expecting these characters to have learned and grown, but it’s not clear how that’s supposed to have happened.

If you’re hoping that the charm and talent of the two stars might save the nonexistent story, there’s more bad news. Both Farrell and Robbie are, unsurprisingly, pretty good. Robbie is clearly more on her game and makes things interesting in brief spurts, but Farrell has a few deep moments that work. The problem is that they simply have no chemistry with each other. At no point does it feel like these are people falling in love. They often don’t seem to even like one another. All their tender moments feel forced. These are talented actors who simply don’t belong in this film together.

Despite the story and casting issues, there are a couple of bright lights. Director Kogonada obviously has fantastic sense for emotional weight. The various scenes may not really work as a whole movie, but they are all fairly compelling individually, and I liked that several of the big, heavy moments were somewhat muted. Pain and regret aren’t always big and over-the-top; it takes a talented director to get the heart out of those moments. It would have been great if the story had used those moments for anything. Credit where it’s due, it’s also all shot gorgeously. For all its issues, nobody can claim this movie isn’t a treat to look at.

That’s not enough to save it, though. Cinema is about more than putting characters in pretty and interesting settings. You have to have them do things and tell stories that are worth watching. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey just never does that. If your GPS is taking you to the theater for this one, you might consider turning it off.