Opening in theaters September 19 is ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,’ directed by Kogonada and starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, Billy Magnussen, and Sarah Gadon.
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Initial Thoughts
Filmmaker Kogonada’s first two films, ‘Columbus’ (2017) and ‘After Yang’ (2021) were, respectively, an unconventionally low-key romance built around architecture and a melancholic meditation on what it means to be human in a high-tech society. ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,’ his third feature and first production for a major Hollywood studio (Sony), attempts to combine whimsy and fantasy with themes of love, regret, and loss, only on a much bigger canvas.
But despite the presence of two of our most charismatic actors, Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, the visually lovely film is let down by a treacly, frequently dull script (by Seth Reiss) that trades real emotions and characters for pre-programmed mannequins and faux sentimentality. It’s one of those movies that reveals all in its trailer (which has been playing for months) and offers nothing beyond its superficial gloss.
Story and Direction
Robbie and Farrell play Sarah and David, two people who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and strike up an immediate attraction, despite both attempting to wave it off (“I’m afraid of hating you,” says Sarah) and insisting they’re not in the market, despite clearly being two lonely, somewhat lost people. What neither knows is that they both rented cars for the occasion from the same mysterious agency, located in a vast warehouse in a narrow alley in the nameless city in which they both live.
The film slides into the fantastical from the start with David’s visit to the agency, where he’s served by a foul-mouthed, German-accented, overly enthusiastic cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and the more elderly, gruff mechanic (Kevin Kline), who rent him a long-discontinued 1994 Saturn SL with a special GPS that offers to take him – and Sarah – on the title trip, which they end up taking together after Sarah’s vehicle breaks down.
That trip takes David and Sarah to a series of doors in unusual places (like the middle of a forest), with each door leading to a moment in one or the other’s past that has defined their attitude toward life and love. In other words, the film offers up the kind of cheap Hollywood excuse for therapy and self-reflection which claims that if you can go back and confront that one thing that’s been hanging you up your whole life, everything else will sort itself out. Not only is that not true, but each major moment in both Sarah and David’s lives is the kind of trite cliché we’ve seen before: getting one last moment with a deceased parent, confronting a lost love, and so on.
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The problem is that we don’t really know anything about either Sarah or David from the start, so they simply feel like automatons going through the motions as they take 109 minutes to arrive at the predetermined outcome of their journey. There’s no real emotion at play here, and no real chemistry either between the stars. When one finally confesses their love for the other, it seems almost comical – they literally just met a day or two before.
Kogonada has a great eye, and he and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb shoot the hell out of ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,’ bathing everything in warm hues and glowing light. But the heart of the movie is hollow, the plot points overly stylized and self-consciously theatrical (Sarah and David actually end up on an empty stage at one point, like they’ve stumbled into a Lars von Trier movie), and the needle drops become increasingly heavy-handed, culminating in ‘Let My Love Open the Door’ playing as someone literally opens a door.
Cast and Performances
In her first screen role since 2023’s ‘Barbie,’ a luminous Margot Robbie does the best she can with a role that is severely underwritten. Sarah keeps telling David that she’s horrible; she tells her mother that she’s bad with men; and yet we never get any real sense of why that is except for what she tells us. Farrell also looks terrific in the film (Kogonada is certainly kind to his actors) and, like his co-star, tries to wrestle some humanity out of his character, but can only go so far with the barely sketched template he’s got to work from.
The best work in the film undoubtedly comes from Waller-Bridge as the car rental agency’s cashier, who gleefully doles out the word ‘f**k’ like candy (hence the otherwise unnecessary R rating) and injects some real Terry Gilliam-like absurdity into the opening moments of the story. It’s too bad she disappears for most of the rest of it, since more of her and Kevin Kline as her straight man would liven up the proceedings considerably. Except for the two leads, none of the other characters even merit actual names.
Final Thoughts
Kogonada’s first two films were marked by their intimacy and even dream-like atmosphere, as well as their own visual acumen, but only the latter makes it into ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.’ The story is so predictable and undercooked, the themes so saccharine, and the characters so flat that this movie runs out of gas long before that Saturn SL ever has a chance to.
‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ receives a score of 40 out of 100.
What is the plot of ‘‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’’?
Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on a fantastical adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their pasts and possibly get a chance to alter their futures.
Who is in the cast of ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’?
- Margot Robbie as Sarah
- Colin Farrell as David
- Kevin Kline as The Mechanic
- Phoebe Waller-Bridge as The Female Cashier
- Jodie Turner-Smith as GPS
- Lily Rabe as Sarah’s Mother
- Billy Magnussen as The Man
- Sarah Gadon as The Woman
- Hamish Linklater as David’s Father
- Jennifer Grant as David’s Mother
List of Margot Robbie Movies
- ‘About Time’ (2013)
- ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (2013)
- ‘Z for Zachariah’ (2015)
- ‘Focus’ (2015)
- ‘The Big Short’ (2015)
- ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ (2016)
- ‘The Legend of Tarzan’ (2016)
- ‘Suicide Squad’ (2016)
- ‘I, Tonya’ (2017)
- ‘Goodbye Christopher Robin’ (2017)
- ‘Peter Rabbit’ (2018)
- ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (2018)
- ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ (2019)
- ‘Bombshell’ (2019)
- ‘Birds of Prey’ (2020)
- ‘The Suicide Squad’ (2021)
- ‘Amsterdam’ (2022)
- ‘Babylon’ (2022)
- ‘Asteroid City’ (2023)
- ‘Barbie’ (2023)
- ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ (2025)
- ‘Wuthering Heights’ (2026)
