There’s a kind of dread that sets in early watching A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the kind that whispers, “This isn’t going to cohere, is it?” It’s not the dread of bad filmmaking, but of a film that’s too afraid to be strange and too eager to be liked. Kogonada, whose previous works were quiet studies in emotional architecture, here directs someone else’s script — Seth Reiss’s — and the result is a film that feels like it’s been sanded down to the point of near-invisibility.
The premise is high-concept: David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) stumble into a series of portals that allow them to revisit their pasts. It’s magical realism, technically, but the magic is more decorative than functional. There’s no internal logic to the portals, no emotional scaffolding to support their use. They exist because the movie wants to gesture toward something profound without doing the work of earning it. It’s a Kaufman-lite conceit, stripped of neurosis and replaced with a kind of narrative politeness.
Kogonada’s decision to trade his existential leanings for rom-com scaffolding is understandable — maybe even brave — but it doesn’t quite work. The film lacks the emotional rigor of Columbus or the speculative melancholy of After Yang. Here, the mood is anxious yet unfocused, as if someone is trying to remember why they walked into a room. The cinematography is competent but unremarkable, the score forgettable, the editing too clean. It’s all a bit too tidy for a story about emotional disarray.
Farrell tries. You can see him reaching for something real in David’s disillusionment, but the script gives him little to hold onto. Robbie, meanwhile, is stranded. Sarah is written as a collection of traits — spiky, guarded, wounded — but never as a person. Their chemistry is theoretical. They share scenes, not sparks. Even their meet-cute at a wedding feels like a placeholder for a better idea that never arrived.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in a supporting role as a cashier with narrative authority, nearly rescues the film with her dry wit and meta charm. She’s the only character who seems to understand the absurdity of the premise and leans into it. Kevin Kline, as a mechanic with cryptic wisdom, adds texture, but it’s not enough.
The title promises a lot. A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey suggests grandeur, risk, and transformation. What we get is a series of gestures toward those things, without the conviction to follow through. The journey is big only in concept, bold only in casting, beautiful only in moments. It’s a film that aspires to be about love, memory, and fate, but ultimately settles for being about two attractive people walking through doors.
And yet, there’s something oddly compelling about its failure. It’s not cynical. It’s not lazy. It’s just lost. There are scenes — brief, flickering ones — where the film almost finds its footing. A quiet exchange between David and his younger self. A moment of vulnerability from Sarah. These fragments suggest a better movie buried beneath the one we got.
In the end, it’s a hit-and-miss affair. More miss than hit, but the hits are enough to keep you watching. You won’t feel satisfied, but you might feel something adjacent to curiosity. And maybe that’s enough.
Grade: B.
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