To call A Big Bold Beautiful Journey a discount version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be giving it way too much credit. First of all, this new film, written by Seth Reiss and directed by Kogonada, absolutely cost a lot more. Second, its main characters, David and Sarah, are nowhere near as tangible as Joel and Clementine, the hapless lovers in the 2004 Michel Gondry classic. Even before this cursed romantic fantasy takes its fanciful turn with a magical GPS and teleporting doors, they don’t resemble real people at all, living in an emphatically unnamed metropolis with no mention of jobs or friends beyond the shared acquaintance at whose wedding they meet. After exchanging glances across the aisle, they have a flirty exchange while looking out at the rain on a break from the dance floor. When this meet-cute, awash in painstakingly enchanting overhead shots of color-coordinated umbrellas doesn’t take, the universe itself intervenes to send the pair on a whimsical road trip on which they can travel into each other’s recent and distant histories. And even then, these incredibly attractive singletons resist the siren song of a potential relationship for as long as possible, like endangered animals who, despite all the efforts of their zookeepers to create the right opportunity, simply refuse to mate.
David and Sarah don’t fall in love over the course of the movie so much as eventually exhaust all the reasons they can’t be together. And it does seem as though they should be together, if only because they’re played by Colin Farrell, in his native accent and with an ideal amount of scruff, and Margot Robbie, whose radiance can’t be dimmed by some confounding costuming choices. There’s a provocative question built into this premise: Do people who say they’re happy alone nevertheless owe it to themselves to consider a partner when a worthy prospect comes along? But rather than treat its characters’ claims of preferring singleness seriously, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey takes for granted that they’re deflecting from dealing with some deeper issues and becomes a tepid magical-realist therapy session in which they learn to overcome their respective baggage in order to achieve coupledom and, through it, contentment. In the place of a shrink, David and Sarah each have a mystical GPS that speaks with the voice of Jodie Turner-Smith and directs them first to link up in the wake of the wedding and then to embark on the titular journey together (both have obtained their cars from the same strange rental agency run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge). They’re guided across the countryside to mysterious doors sitting by themselves in a field or embedded into old billboards, and when they enter, they’re brought to significant places from their pasts.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
The movie wants to give David and Sarah a certain abstract quality, but at the same time the entire story revolves around specific formative moments from their lives. They’re reduced to their romantic histories and presented as two self-help books waiting to be written — though David, with his habit of building up women in his head when pursuing them and then being disappointed when he’s actually with them, gets off easier than Sarah, who announces early on that she habitually sabotages her relationships by cheating. She’s a damaged-hot-girl fantasy, someone whose allure comes from informing you she’s trouble and then daring you to think you might be the exception.
To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically evenhanded waste of talent. Farrell and Robbie are adrift, but then Kline and Waller-Bridge (doing a broad German accent) never figure out the right tone for the touch of the surreal they represent. In thankless smaller roles, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Lily Rabe, and Hamish Linklater play fragments of memories of people, there to enable David and Sarah to continue on their path toward self-actualization. Reiss, an Onion alum who co-wrote the similarly gimmicky but infinitely more pleasurable The Menu, bears most of the blame here (“It’s funny how the most beautiful places make you feel the most alone,” David intones early on). But Kogonada, coming off the delicate indie dramas Columbus and After Yang, struggles the most. He manages to find touches of the transcendent amid the contrivance, such as the sequence in which the two leads roam a museum after-hours in the dark, taking in paintings by flashlight. But he’s a filmmaker who’s best at subtext and things left understood but unsaid, and here it often feels as if he’s at war with a script in which characters speak bluntly and blandly about their internal workings. Still, it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing a better job with this material, which is all about the idea of having a relationship without ever approaching the reality of one. The real big bold beautiful journey was inside us all along — but that’s just another way of saying we’re not getting anywhere.
