Director: Kogonada
Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Screenplay: Seth Reiss
108 mins. Rated R for language.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a big, bold, and beautiful story of two lonely-bodies and a magical GPS. Director Kogonada (Columbus) reteams with Colin Farrell (The Batman) to make something that feels like a romance film with the director’s signature experimentation. Though the finished film suffers from an ambitious albeit unfocused screenplay, the central performances from Farrell and Margot Robbie (Barbie) make for a romantic journey unlike most you’re likely to see.

David (Farrell) needs to rent a car quick for a weekend wedding. He rents one from The Car Rental Agency, an aptly titled service that gets him a car with a unique GPS. When the wedding ends, his GPS offers him a Big Bold Beautiful Journey, where he is paired up with Sarah (Robbie), a woman uninterested in relationships due to her own personal self-destructive nature. The two make several stops on the way home, finding doors in the wild that take them to their pasts and allow them to view themselves and each other in new and fascinating ways.

Kogonada brings the screenplay to light with inventive visuals and a focus on the more peculiar elements of the screenplay. I loved the visualization of the doorways on the journey home and how both characters get to view elements from their past, and I also enjoyed the sequences where they end up in an open void and are forced to act out these impactful memories with one another. Opening up in front of someone you barely know would force an intimacy and allows for deep personal connection (I wish more of that ended up in the screenplay, but we’ll get there), and Kogonada captures the two lead performances with incredible tenderness. I wish, though, that there was more variety than the amount of mysterious doors that pop up, as it lends a bit of a repetitive nature to this BOLD journey. Kogonada’s direction reminded me of the Andrew Haigh film All of Us Strangers, which follows a similarly lost character who accesses the past via fantasy means. That film hits the pain and loss of memories better than Kogonada’s film, but A Big Bold Beautiful Journey hits the emotions of youth with intense accuracy. I was dying inside as David had to relive his lead in the school play, and it’s moments like this one where the film shines.

I just wish the screenplay were stronger to match Kogonada’s skills. The screenplay replays several character beats without any forward progression, and that can make relating to Sarah and David a bit frustrating. There’s a sequence in a coffee shop that almost feels like the climax of the movie, but then the characters are walking down the road and the movie’s forward momentum comes to a halt, the character progression moves backwards, and it feels like the screenwriter was worried the movie was too short and tacked on another ending that didn’t feel as impactful. Either removing the extra bloat in the back half of the film or taking another draft of the screenplay altogether would’ve helped with this story.

Colin Farrell is the standout here; he plays unshaven, awkward, and frightened quite exceptionally for a man as handsome as he is. David’s also a bit more of an accessible lead, we can see a lot of ourselves in him, whereas Sarah is dealing with headier themes of loss and self-destruction in extreme measures. Seeing how each of them views the other’s memories is a fascinating way to view human connection, and the two actors play well off each other well.

Kogonada has crafted an interesting fantasy/drama/romance hybrid, and I love the examination of finding one’s own self-love before attempting to love another, and his two leads have nice chemistry. I wish the screenplay had a bit more inventiveness to match the director’s energy, and I wish the character arcs were a bit tighter, but what we have is still more than compelling enough to recommend. It’s a conundrum of a movie; not all of it works, but plenty of it does, thanks to its swoon-worthy leads and an exciting filmmaker at the helm.

3.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe