That Kogonada is neither a writer nor editor credited on his third feature is the first worrying road sign on this “Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” roles he maintained on both the coolly observed, intellectual romance “Columbus” and the cozy, ruminative AI sci-fi “After Yang.”
His latest film, a drawn-out, time-hopping romance between Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as script-y stick figures trapped by a sentient rental car into literally driving down the memory lane of their most formative episodes, features both embarrassingly earnest writing and nonsensical, incoherent editing. Perhaps someone could have asked the film’s director to step away from the camera and in on either front.
Pairing Kogonada with screenwriter Seth Reiss’ (“The Menu”) disaster-bound dump truck of cliches feels like an insult to and an underestimation of the Cannes-crowned filmmaker’s prior proven bona fides: It’s not a drama, it’s not a comedy, it’s not a romance, but it’s kind of a musical at one point? That much I know is true.
Less discernible human characters than the shapes of people who look like them, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding they are both attending stag. That the wedding takes place in a hotel called La Strada and on a very rainy day tells you that we are in a fanciful la-la land of cutesy cinematic references and a world in which a contrived meet-cute congeals around coincidences and pastels. Robbie, styled in a newsboy cap and oversized red coat, looks like she just came back from a semester abroad living in Soho, Londontown.
The costumes and production design are all Jacques Demy by way of Anthropologie, color-popped to impose personality on the personality-less (and with Bright Eyes and Mitski on the soundtrack to reinforce the indie tweeness). Beyond just looking cheap and CW-adjacent, the styling only reinforces the level of artifice and unwillingness to go deeper than skin or sickly cotton-candy-sweet surfaces.
David and Sarah, across nearly two testing hours that unfold at the pace you imagine being forced to relive your life’s most painful moments on the road to rediscovering your inner manic pixie dream child would, aren’t revealed to have any dreams of their own beyond the failed quest for love. (Though David’s pasted-on childhood fondness for musicals implies something adjacent to character development here.)
They are, rather, cut-outs of rom-com archetypes: David is a sad, lonely man whose father (Hamish Linklater) recently died, and Sarah is a self-confessed serial cheater whose mother (Lily Rabe, Linklater’s wife and a welcome respite, given her increasing likeness to her mother, the late Jill Clayburgh) died when she was a college freshman screwing her professor.
Back up a bit, though the connective tissue is missing here: In the opening sequence, David’s parked car gets the dreaded yellow boot due to unpaid parking tickets, a note pasted curbside directing him to an ominous rental car company that turns out to be operated out of a warehouse by an asleep-at-the-wheel Kevin Kline and cloyingly smirky Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It’s the car David takes to the wedding, and the car whose GPS, when David eventually offers Sarah a ride, that promises them both a “big bold beautiful journey,” a phrase they are meant to say back to it like some kind of greeting-card-tailored, reverse “there’s no place like home.” Said car then takes them on said journey, where each stop is outfitted with a portal-like door that allows them to enter into past milestones: break-ups, significant deaths, soul-shifting encounters with art.
The most charming sequences allows the 49-year-old Colin Farrell to dust off his song and dance skills in a performance, as his adolescent David self, in a school production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Sarah stands up from the audience to fill in the lyrics after David, confronting his then childhood girlfriend, grinds the performance to an auditorium-freezing halt. There’s another stridently mawkish sequence in which David and Sarah both re-experience their most wounding breakups — David with a woman he was engaged to (played by Sarah Gadon) and Sarah with a cableknit-sweater-clad Billy Magnussen, whom she left and ghosted in the middle of the night — in tandem.
The problem here is that David and Sarah learn or glean nothing meaningful or revelatory in rehashing old traumas; much like filmmakers, they’re observing the material as if moving slides on a Kodak wheel rather than actually engaging with them. Whereas in a movie like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Joel and Clementine replayed and relived the past to understand where they’ve gone wrong in the present, David and Sarah’s only lesson learned here is that they apparently belong together romantically after all, despite his mopiness and tendency toward shutting people out, and her lifelong allergy to monogamy and bohemianism. It’s unfortunate, too, that the actors seem to have an allergy to each other in the sparks department, with about as much chemistry as that between two walls that happen to be facing each other.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” suffers from the fact that Kogonada, who got his start crafting online video essay analyses of his favorite films and TV shows before debuting with “Columbus” at Sundance 2017 and taking “After Yang” to Cannes in 2021, has no personal stamp on the project. This film is like a splotchy watercolor of vaguely blotted emotions next to the pointilist emotional precision of his prior two films.
Reiss’ script was a Black List find that either wasn’t reworked enough by committee or so sanded down in the studio churn that all personality was drained in the process. Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb (“Pieces of a Woman,” “Dream Scenario,” “Mandy”) shoots the film more like a cheery extended ad campaign for the AI-powered vehicle driving the characters toward catharsis, and there’s certainly nothing romantic about a movie that features multiple moments of cringe-in-your-seat Burger King product placement.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.
Grade: D+
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” opens in theaters from Sony Pictures on Friday, September 19.
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