Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Movie Review by Lisa Blanck
Meet David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie). A pair of attractive, unattached wedding guests. Is it a meet cute? Could be.It’s definitely a meet-awkward. The two find themselves repeatedly glancing in the other’s direction. Their eyes say ‘yes’, but their words are swamps of ‘WTH’, their mouths spilling stories from their pasts, tales specifically designed to push the other one away. This is self-sabotage on full display.
The couple are magnetic in their fields of attraction, with exterior forces pushing them together while their interior dialog repeatedly forces them apart. Both struggling with the weighty burden of regrets they’re openly carrying on their backs. Family challenges, childhood trauma, dating mishaps, first loves. People they’ve hurt. The stuff of life. Regrets, they’ve had a few, and the pair continually hearken back to them like touchstones.
But now they’ve got a pair of agents, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline, representatives from an otherworldly car rental company, ushering them through a sequence of doors.Waller-Bridge and Kline are not only able to recreate scenes from the past; they can also control the weather. David and Sarah are soon embarking on an unplanned road-trip in a 1994 Saturn, with a highly recommended GPS. Highly recommended.
“Doors are tricky”, David’s told, the first time he enters the rental agency to pick up his car. Doors are being carried about in the background.In A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Director Kogonada pushes David and Sarah through a series of doors, letting them work out, or at least, address, their past regrets. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in other time-travel films. But the chemistry between Farrell and Robbie is undeniable, which manages to keep their Journey enjoyable.
What I most appreciated in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, is that our leads sometimes travel solo through the doors to their pasts. They don’t experience or see the trauma the other faces. Writer Seth Reiss allows each to do what they need, without any interference from their travelling partner to influence their actions. It’s not as compelling a film as The Life of Chuck, a transtemporal travel film released earlier this year, but it doesn’t aim to be. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is smaller, more personal, in both scope and focus. You’ll find yourself rooting for David and Sarah because of their flaws, not in spite of them.
