What would you do if you could step through a door and relive your past? That idea lies at the heart of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Kogonada’s messy foray into the romantasy genre starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as a would-be couple. Whereas the filmmaker’s Columbus and After Yang undergirded intimate examinations on relationships and grief with thoughtful dialogue, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey opts for self-help aphorisms, cloyingly asking us to embrace the sincerity of its impersonal romance.
The magic realism-inflected story promises a big, bold, beautiful journey, and that it’s fated for David (Farrell) and Sarah (Robbie), who first meet by happenstance at a wedding but are later reunited by the magical GPS systems on the cars they rented. Eventually, they’re spurred on by the GPS to test their connection by reliving their childhood memories together.
Opening doors to explore memories is an over-the-head metaphor for letting someone into one’s own life, but more irksome here is that the actual journey through our main characters’ memories doesn’t bring about much catharsis for them. Neither David nor Sarah come to some profound realization about the course of their lives: David still succumbs to his teenage crush in the high school play and Sarah still feels guilt for not being there for her mother.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is the first of his features that Kogonada hasn’t written, but it isn’t a departure from his usual preoccupations, namely people fostering connection as they throw their arms around their melancholy. While there’s pleasure to how, as it sifts through David and Sarah’s memories, it practically becomes a musical, the film never really settles on a tone. That may be apt for a story that’s about characters figuring themselves out, but there’s so little nuance to David and Sarah that, even when we learn that he survived a heart condition and she misses her mother, it’s impossible to be moved by their journey.
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