A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is, I have to tell you, anything but. I should have trusted the trailer. When I caught this, my first thought was ‘heck, that looks bad’. Stupidly, I was not put off. The film is written by Seth Reiss (co-writer of The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (if you haven’t seen After Yang, more fool you). And it stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. It can’t be that bad, surely? Reader, I swear to you, it is.
The direction is prosaic and sentimental while Robbie and Farrell have zero chemistry, not a squeak
It’s a romantic fantasy about two people who have resolved to stay single but whose lives are changed via a magical GPS system – and if I’ve already lost you, fair play. We are first introduced to David (Farrell) as he’s hiring a car from an agency staffed by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is pretending to be German for some reason. She forces the GPS system onto him. There is a considerable amount of back and forth. As it’s so integral to the plot, why doesn’t the car just come with the GPS? But we’ll skip past that and proceed to the wedding that he’s driving to. Another guest, Sarah (Robbie), catches David’s eye. She tells him she’s not for him. She’ll hurt him. She goes off with another fella – she doesn’t care about hurting this one? – while he returns to his hotel room alone.
The following morning, as he’s driving home, the GPS speaks to him directly and asks him if he wants to go on ‘a big bold beautiful journey’ and when he says he does it directs him to a fast-food joint. And who should he bump into there? You guessed it. Sarah is wearing a baker-boy cap but it could just as easily have been a beret. You get what I’m saying.
She agrees to join him on this big bold beautiful journey that isn’t. The GPS directs them to a door standing alone in a wood. ‘We have to go through it,’ he says. ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘We just do,’ he says, although he might just as well have said: ‘As there’d be no story otherwise.’ They encounter a variety of doors that take them back to moments in their past, allowing them to relive and resolve their issues. We visit the school where he was rejected by his teenage crush. She has always felt guilty about not being there when her mother died but now she can be taken back to the hospital to correct that. In the hospital waiting room, he bumps into his father. His father reveals that his son has just been born with a heart condition that could be fatal but they’ll never tell him because they want to protect him. I’d be furious if I had a potentially fatal heart condition that my parents never told me about, but David is moved to tears by their love. Huh?
There are many moments that make you go ‘huh?’ At one point, in a museum, they enter a painting. Huh? Elsewhere, David becomes his own father. Huh? We also meet their past partners. We learn that David loses interest in women as soon as the chase is over, and that Sarah is a cheater. We see this but, just to make sure, they explain themselves to each other constantly. They speak in clichés yet act as if they were saying the profoundest statements ever made in the history of cinema. A choice example: ‘It’s funny how the most beautiful places make you feel most alone.’
The direction is prosaic and sentimental, while Robbie and Farrell have zero chemistry, not a squeak, and understandably fail to breathe life into such poorly written characters. (Farrell is mostly reduced to eyebrow acting.) Meanwhile, we’re always aware of the gears at work, and exactly where we are headed. No GPS necessary.
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