By Kyle Logan
Copyright chicagoreader
Just in case anyone missed the “bold” in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s title, the first two minutes include credits on almost blindingly bright colored backgrounds, Phoebe Waller-Bridge hamming it up with an absurd German accent, and a conversation about performance allowing us to find truth. It may be the film warning viewers that if you’re not willing to buy into the silliness and earnestness, there’s no way you’ll enjoy what’s to come.
The titular journey—guided by a mysterious rental car agency—takes David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie), two single adults who no longer believe in love (if they ever did), back through several major moments in their lives. Going through these experiences together allows them to face their pasts and learn about each other as they alternate his and hers traumas. On paper it sounds awful, but the vast majority of it works.
Farrell and Robbie may well be the key to that, as their stardom and chemistry help sell some of the film’s more cloying lines from writer Seth Reiss’s script. Even when they aren’t talking, they’re pulling off magic tricks of charm. When she smiles, Robbie’s eyes are nothing less than miraculous, and Farrell, in a light-blue suit with salt-and-pepper scruff, lighting up a cigarette while leaning against a pillar, contends for the hottest anyone has ever looked onscreen. They both also wholeheartedly commit to a musical number that feels like director Kogonada’s (very strong) case for a studio letting him direct a big-budget classic musical.
Costume designer Arjun Bhasin, production designer Katie Byron, and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb deserve credit too; they make these stars and the world around them look amazing. A sequence in a museum after-hours lit only by flashlights, Robbie’s various red and yellow ensembles, and the smattering of sunsets are all truly stunning.
It’s frustrating, then, that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey can’t seem to help but push beyond the limits of what it can get away with. In the back half, the movie’s big swings stop connecting, leaving us with an odd push-and-pull of emotionally impactful and distancing scenes. It doesn’t help that one of these scenes reads, to be unkind, as breeder propaganda, highlighting that this is a movie about a very specific form of monogamous, heterosexual romance.
Whether the big swings work or not, though, it’s a welcome surprise to see a colorful, midbudget studio film that’s willing to take them. R, 108 min.
