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.

Sarah and David meet for the first time at a wedding. Glances are exchanged, the banter begins and after a few false starts they reconnect for a cross-country road trip in a rental car which comes with its own quirks. David finds the car, an elderly classic, at a company run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who adopts a wacky German accent for the role. He’s the mechanic, she’s the cashier, and before they hand over the car they make David feel as if he’s up for an audition of some kind. They also know more about him and his life than is seemingly possible. What’s more, the antique GPS contraption that goes with the car turns out to have firm ideas of its own about the route he and Sarah should take.

Loading

Their most entertaining trip into the past takes them back to David’s adolescence. While Sarah perceives him as the man she met at the wedding, everybody around them sees him as a callow 15 year old, besotted by a classmate and highly nervous at the prospect of starring in his high school’s production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

But guilt and tragedy also form part of the itinerary as both travellers are forced to revisit episodes they would rather forget until their individual memories begin to overlap and intersect, allowing each to witness the other at their very worst.