But before any of that happens, David meets Robbie’s Sarah, a fellow wedding guest. They flirt cautiously, but Sarah makes it clear that she’s not the type to commit. In these early scenes, Sarah sets off warning bells that she’s going to be, in the words of critic Nathan Rabin, one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl who gives off “I’m ever so bad for you, but you’re going to want me anyway” vibes.
In fact, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey sets off one warning bell after another. It often veers too close to sentimentality. Plus, any use of the word journey is immediately suspect in my book. But even when I wanted to scoff at what I was seeing onscreen, I couldn’t. David and Sarah don’t get together at that wedding—she leaves, and goes to bed, with someone else—but their paths cross later, again only seemingly by chance, at a roadside Burger King. Sarah’s car—also rented from the wackadoodle duo at the Car Rental Agency—breaks down, and she accepts a lift from David. Together, they’re prompted by that mystical, magical GPS to seek out a series of doors to nowhere. As they walk through each, they’re brought to specific times and places that made them who they are. Sarah returns to the museum she and her late mother used to love to visit, which resurrects her feelings of guilt over not being at her mother’s bedside when she died. David revisits the night he starred in his high school production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which he remembers chiefly for the way he was rebuffed by the girl he had a crush on. These are the things—sometimes trivial, sometimes of great magnitude—we hang onto as we stumble through life. In witnessing each other’s painful memories, David and Sarah learn a lot about each other, perhaps too much.
