Early into the namesake for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) venture back in time to his high school, on the night of his first heartbreak. He clutches his chest, but smiles – laughs, even. “It feels exactly like it felt,” he says, visually giddy at the sensation of the same earth-shattering pain coursing through his body that he experienced at age fifteen. For David, being able to feel that strongly is a rare and special thing.
It’s the kind of gentle yet potent emotion that the video essayist-turned-director Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) made his name in – those exchanges of surprising honesty and tenderness, unveiling deep wells of feeling beneath the simplest of gestures. But in every other way, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is (Star Wars TV work aside) unlike anything the filmmaker has made before: an ambitious studio-backed odyssey through past and present, memory and reality. Or at least, an offbeat version of reality. It kicks off when David picks up a 1994 Saturn SL from a mysterious car rental agency that also offers a seemingly sentient GPS. He drives off to a wedding and hits it off with Sarah before they part ways the next day, that is, until they’re swiftly rerouted back together again for an adventure through magical doors that allow them to relive their most formative memories.
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The DNA of Kogonada’s earlier contemplative dramas comes through in the meandering conversations David and Sarah have on their impromptu road trip. It’s a long-winded way to fall in love, but in confronting the moments that calcified them, they eventually embrace the opportunity for connection. But A Big Bold Beautiful Journey really has more in common with Makoto Shinkai, whose films contain an unabashed earnestness that’s as vast as their fantasy worlds. That reverence for animé runs through the music as well, with a delicate score from the legendary Joe Hisaishi that’s more minimalist than his Studio Ghibli collaborations – but equally as transportive.
It’s only a shame that it’s countered by some baffling needle drops that more likely came from the mind of a studio exec than Kogonada’s. The script from The Menu scribe Seth Reiss also inches towards feeling simplistic and aggressively twee, but Kogonada elevates the material. “We have to perform to get to the truth,” Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s rental car clerks tell David before handing over the keys. It’s an obvious line that lays the groundwork for his and Sarah’s forays into their past, but the filmmaker stretches the concept to the abstract when the pair confront each other in a black box theatre space. Here, life is a performance that rehearsal time can’t perfect. The mistakes and the slip-ups, the embarrassment and pain, are just as necessary as the joy and glory.
And how glorious it is. Kogonada continues to bring out the best in his After Yang star, Farrell – especially in a show-stopping sequence set at a high school musical performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He also provides the space for Robbie to tap into levels of vulnerability she rarely accesses. Operating on a grander scale, Kogonada still retains his singular, warm sensibility – and if you can succumb to the film’s heart-on-its-sleeve sentimentality, it’s a journey worth taking.