For a brief, bold, brilliant moment, Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey feels like it might actually be what the title claims. It comes about 30 or so minutes after a dreary prologue and not-meet-cute that’s meant to push our leads David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) together. Having both independently rented cars from the Car Rental Agency, staffed by a German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge and a surprisingly grizzled Kevin Kline, to attend a mutual friend’s wedding, their first encounter ends as disappointingly as it can. But the next day, the retro-styled GPSes in their 1994 Saturns practically beg them to go on an adventure, one that might turn their frowns upside down and get them together. What could this exciting voyage be? A mystical quest or something?
Well, turns out the answer’s “trauma bonding.” David and Sarah spend the rest of the film wandering through their pasts, reliving the worst moments of their lives with a near-total stranger (who they at least think is attractive) as they pass through a series of doors. Back to that fantastic scene: their first stop is David’s high school, on the opening night of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He’s in his 15-year-old body (Sarah remains the same age, visible to the phantoms of memory, inspiring one of the few legitimate laugh lines), re-experiencing the moment as it happens, complete with the knowledge that he’ll fuck up his night by telling a girl who is very much not interested in him that he loves her. Before he does that, however, he has a musical number to get through. Farrell kills the first song, absolutely nailing the pleading showmanship of a talented high schooler at a rich private school. He sings, he dances, and God help me, he’s absolutely incredible. If nothing else, check out this scene on YouTube when it inevitably lands there, and weep for the potential this movie had.
That’s the problem: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has no idea what it should be, aside from a magical realist tale so glibly twee that it fucks up the sentimental notes that it so desperately wants to land. Kogonada’s always-accomplished imagery evokes Demy or One From the Heart Coppola, but it refuses to embrace its full potential and be a full-on musical like The Young Girls of Rochefort, l or, like Coppola’s underrated masterwork, a silent with gorgeous technicolor visuals and a truly masterful score (there’s a dialogue-free option on the DVD that everyone who thinks that movie sucks should watch). Instead, it’s subdued and restrained in the way that certain films by great visual stylists are: often stirring in its compositions, functionally inert as a coherent narrative, wasting the work of Joe Hisaishi, Hayao Miyazaki’s longtime musical collaborator, in its fits and stutters. If it weren’t for the magnetic charisma of the leads, the Dan Fogelman-styled treacle would metaphorically annihilate one’s pancreas with its saccharine corn/syrup mixture.
That’s to be expected, given that Farrell and Robbie are proper Movie Stars, and they run laps around Seth Reiss’s screenplay. When they’re able to find what life exists within his stilted construct of a magical realist world, Kogonada comes alive, for the briefest of moments, trying to preserve and sustain the fire before we’re let down when the script takes another detour to Candyland. Yet, in transforming the self-discovery found in the early days of a relationship into a winsomely precocious parable, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey never lets us really fall in love with the characters or allows them to express the exaggerated emotions of the moment. It’s somehow fitting that the After Yang director wouldn’t be able to do much with this: His work is often at an observational remove, at odds with the energy of the moving image he spent years analyzing frame-by-frame. His future Earth in that film felt entirely artificial (it’s hard to tell who the robot is when everyone is acting like they’re made of silicon), so why would his vision of a magical one be any different?
That’s why the musical number stands out: It’s not at all what one expects, yet it fully utilizes his talents — framing, color, and so forth — and it’s hard not to wish he’d pursue that energetic impulse to sustain a feature-length work. He’s got the style, the access to talent, and, as he proves in that one scene, the ability to craft lively cinematic moments. So, this Big Bold Beautiful Journey might not be the one, but perhaps his next one will live up to the promise of this little.