RATING
Director(s): Kogonada
Country: United States
Author: Seth Reiss
Actor(s): Colin Farrer, Margot Robbie, Jennifer Grant
Written by Tom Augustine
When I was sixteen I made a short film called Contemplating the View. It was a very sixteen-year-old short film, a self-serious ode from someone who hadn’t experienced much of anything up to that point to how ‘everyone is connected, man’. It featured a range of vignettes that ended with people staring out at a view. It was not good — I did not preserve a copy of it. I haven’t thought about it for a very long time, but A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey sure did remind me of it. Like the short film that I made during my awkward teenage years, this film is a high concept narrative that remains annoyingly vague when it comes to having anything to say. It trades in the kind of stoner-philosophy that Tumblr-teens and one-time emos will recall with a shiver down their spine. It even has a similarly unwieldy, stupid title. It’s the kind of film that’s crammed with maudlin acoustic covers of pop songs that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Scrubs. It’s not good. A bizarrely mounted, defanged pseudo-fantasy, its bold visuals and self-styled earnestness would suggest that it belongs alongside technicolor adventures of a simpler time, your Wizard of Ozes and your Sound of Musics. But to remind us that we’ve evolved from that era of supposedly simplistic filmmaking, A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey eagerly sprinkles the word ‘fuck’ into its wordy, self-conscious screenplay. What this film lacks that those earlier films had, though, is a sense of life. Everything about A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is bewildering, from that godawful title to the embarrassing trailers to the lobotomised performances of its starry cast. But nothing about the film is stranger than the presence of its director, Kogonada.
A one-time video essayist, Kogonada’s first foray into filmmaking, the wonderfully understated Columbus, suggested the emergence of an American Ozu — someone for whom drama emerges slowly, truthfully, and without ceremony. His follow-up, the science fiction After Yang, was more divisive, but never did one get the sense that the filmmaker was compromising themselves or diverting from the path of a promising new auteur. Here, he pairs with screenwriter Seth Reiss, who wrote the milquetoast fine-dining satire The Menu, and whose leaden dialogue is one of the film’s most marked failures. How did this pairing come to be? The script was hot property for a minute — title and all — as part of the Blacklist, an annually released roundup of the most exciting spec scripts circulating Hollywood. Kogonada is clearly not the kind of filmmaker suited to a hired-gun job, nor does he have a way with the arch, supposedly snappy dialogue for which many American writers have adopted an ear. Journey is a fantasy, one in which two nondescript thirty-to-forty-somethings Sarah and David (Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) find themselves at the same wedding of an anonymous acquaintance. After both renting cars from the same magical rental car company, which equips each car with a sentient GPS (seemingly modelled on HAL-9000), both are swept along on the aforementioned journey, the goal of which is to bring them together in love. That’s not a spoiler, by the way — it is an utterly foregone conclusion, as nothing in this film even remotely errs from the path that’s laid out from the opening scene, as though the film itself were guided by an unbearably twee GPS. As the journey continues, the pair are guided to various doors that appear in meadows, on billboards, and in the middle of stretches of trees. Each door leads them back to a memory of the past, allowing each other to see their darkest moments, and thus come to truly know each other — something neither character has felt comfortable doing before. The idea is novel, to a point — it is clearly invoking the works of Charlie Kaufman in its lightly postmodern excavation of modern-day neuroses, but with little of the edge or anxiety that Kaufman injects into his storytelling. In practice, it ensures that A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey operates entirely within the theoretical, sapping urgency from the drama in a way that is totally fatal to what the filmmakers clearly intend to be a pleasantly fantastical love story.
Squandering an unethical amount of exceptional talent, A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is an airless exercise in evasive storytelling. Phony and dramatically inert, director Kogonada undercuts his two promising first features with a work that seems intent on operating entirely in scare quotes.
In fact, there is not much of any kind of emotion in A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey — it is as smooth and blemish-free as an Apple product, as featureless as a blank sheet of paper, a total nonentity of a movie. Kogonada’s bombast-free approach roots his performers in scenes that feel airless, dead on arrival. Farrell and Robbie, two excellent performers, are here playing characters designed to be universal archetypes, and thus essentially empty vessels. The memories the two drift into — a dead mother, a humiliating high school heartbreak, a difficult breakup — are the kinds of stopoffs that play into our expectations, offering virtually no variance to the emotional landscape. Supporting performers emerge briefly — Phoebe Waller Bridge and Kevin Kline(!) play the ‘kooky’ employees of the rental car company, while Sarah Gadon and Billy Magnussen appear briefly as ex-lovers — but as with everything in the film, the feeling of artifice and unreality ensures that we can’t ground ourselves in anything, not least the petty misfortunes of these characters’ pasts. Koganada’s standard, evocative visual style is wasted here on backdrops of excruciating artificiality, fields and roads with no distinguishing features, their importance implied rather than felt. Like contemporaries Chloe Zhao and Celine Song, filmmakers whose refined, artful approaches have clashed in ugly ways with the broader strokes of the Hollywood machine (in Eternals and Materialists, respectively), Kogonada’s intense subtlety does him no favours. A film like this cries out for messiness, flashbang operatic strokes, real earnestness rather than nondescript feelings in scare quotes. The broad technicolor marvels of the mid-Twentieth Century understood this — they were purposefully devoid of subtlety, understanding that the more simply laid out their intentions, the easier it’d be for an audience to sign up for the ride.
A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is just under 110-minutes long, but feels longer. I have sat through some very bad movies until the end — Caught Stealing, for a recent example — and I managed to last until the end-credits here, but it was a struggle. Rarely have I felt the urge to walk out midway through more acutely than here. A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is arguably not as bad as Caught Stealing, but the feelings of emptiness it evokes are more pronounced, because we’ve seen that Kogonada is no hack (though, were he a bona-fide schlockmaster, he might be better suited to this material). The film is deeply dispiriting, proof that humans can work on something that feels AI-generated even when AI isn’t involved. Empty and lifeless, it’s a film that, now more than ever, feels like a genuine waste of time. As fascism escalates in United States and beyond, white supremacists are championed as national heroes, genocide plays out on our phone screens, and the climate topples off the side of a cliff, who has time for such things? I am aware that this is not entirely A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey’s fault — people need their escapism. But when the escapism is as hollow as it is here, what nourishment can be found? So much of our modern-day entertainment, the stuff we call ‘content’, is designed to distract and anesthetise. I have less time than ever for work that sits on the fence. I don’t doubt that Kogonada and his fellow creatives have worthwhile things to say in their work — so why have they wasted our time on something that says nothing?
The Long Walk is in cinemas now.