By Sandra Hall
Copyright smh
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey★★★(MA) 139 minutes
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell go time travelling in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
The film’s Korean-born American director Kogonada is calling the story “magic realism”. I guess it also fits into that highly fashionable literary category, “romantasy”. Admittedly, there’s not an alien, a dragon or a demon in sight but it does feature a series of miraculous portals – coloured doors which appear in unlikely places and lead to the past. Each one returns either Sarah or David (Robbie and Farrell) to a particular point in their lives to re-live a key experience while the other goes along for the ride. By the end of the trip, memories have been shared, insights gained and, predictably enough, love blooms although an inordinate amount of soul-searching has to be done along the way.
It sounds like a recipe high on syrup, and for much of the time it plays that way, with plenty of long, talky stretches spinning out the miles. But the screenplay is by Seth Reiss, best known for co-writing The Menu (2022), an acid dose of comic horror sending up the cult of the celebrity chef. And he generates a few laughs along with the tears. He wrote the screenplay in 2020 when it made its way on to the Black List, Hollywood’s summary of the year’s best unproduced scripts. Four years later, its reputation finally bore fruit.
