Early in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, we are told that ‘sometimes we have to perform to get to the truth’. It’s a line that director Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) loads with such significance, he makes sure we hear it again a little later, just in case we missed it. Because that’s what this magic-realist road movie romance is all about, for its lead characters at least: accepting hard truths by reenacting the key moments in their lives that made them them.
It starts whimsically enough. Lonely traveller David (Colin Farrell) hires a car from a quirky rental company run by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (with a German accent) and Kevin Kline, who insist he take their apparently sentient GPS. After forcing him together with Sarah (Margot Robbie) – another lonely traveller David’s just met at a mutual friend’s wedding – this kooky route-finder directs them to a series of magic doorways, which the imperfect strangers unquestioningly walk through to experience significant memories, from a high-school musical to the death of a parent.
To some degree, the film operates like A Christmas Carol-style time-travel movie. So it’s less about changing history than reviving it for the sake of therapy, as if David and Sarah are in relationship counselling before they’ve even started a relationship. And that, of course, is their presumed final destination: love. Proper warts-and-all, for-better-or-for-worse love.
It brings a bit of silver-lining energy to our overcast world
Kogonada’s previous two movies were low-key and gentle, but for his third outing he’s opened up and brightened up – as the title suggests – without losing his knack for a gorgeously composed shot (such as a heavenly hilltop that overlooks all of planet Earth) or heightening the chemistry between his actors (Farrell and Robbie make a great not-yet-couple).
However, the experience is somewhat diminished by The Menu writer Seth Reiss’s script, which is very self-help-texty in places, while remaining needlessly abstract in others (we never learn, for example, exactly where David and Sarah live, or what either of them does for a living).
But its heart is in the right place, at least. Despite an occasional burst of self-mocking glibness (mostly via Robbie, who skirts but never quite tilts into the manic-dream-pixie playground), this is a movie that isn’t afraid of sincerity, and it brings a bit of silver-lining energy to our overcast world.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Sep 19