Directed By Kogonada

Starring – Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge

The Plot – In this tale, David (Farrell) heads to a wedding in his old car with a unique GPS. He meets Sarah (Robbie), and together, they embark on a journey suggested by the GPS. Along the way, they confront their pasts and explore painted landscapes, leading to a deeper connection. As they contemplate their future, they face a crucial decision about their relationship

Rated R for adult language

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY – New Trailer (HD)

POSITIVES

Despite a laboriously tedious execution full of chewed exposition for the audience’s digesting, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” does effectively attain with it a hard-hitting message about the value of life’s many moments serving as temporary pitstops to the final destination, all the while painting a lavishly luscious canvas full of breathtaking shots of vibrancy that play particularly well on the big screen. On the former, David and Sarah confront their respective pasts by reliving the defining moments that have enacted their current mentalities, and while the framing device of insightful characters from the present interacting with their youthful representations from the past is certainly not an original concept for cinema, Kogonada’s direction goes a long way towards measuring the emotional dexterity of these moments quite marvelously, evading the kind of tonal whiplash that can exhaust audiences long before the climax takes shape, all the while inspiring a vivid spectacle that feels like the atmosphere conjured from musicals, without the musical numbers to accompany them, in turn conveying a fantastical embodiment that feels unlike anything atmospherically that the director of “Columbus” or “After Yang” has even come close to attempting, to this point. As for the entrancing factor of so much ocular enticement, the cinematography here from Benjamin Loeb captures the whimsically wondrous imagery of life, both with intoxicating scenic shots across a versatility of landscapes, as well as a vibrancy in texture that allows the color schemes of the movie to pop feverishly in an almost technicolor kind of captivity. It drives the film to at least live up to one of the preconceived expectations in its long-winded title, offering an alluring presentation that works terrifically alongside Kogonada’s aforementioned fantastical rendering, all with a three-dimensional appeal that is effortlessly immersive, and though so much captured is attained artificially with C.G backdrops, the special effects never feel evidentially obvious in the ways they’re casually manifested, offering a colorful canvas for our duo of charismatic megastars to continuously lose themselves in while searching for answers with aging and experienced eyes. On the aspect of performances, Farrell and Robbie are deliciously delightful as these two distractingly beautiful people at a standstill in their respective lives, with Farrell’s boldly emotive eyes and Robbie’s magnetically penetrating personality openly embracing the kind of emotional vulnerability that occasionally the script demands out of them, especially during melodramatic sequences that drown on a bit longer than necessary. While the dazzling duo are regressed quite a bit with a script that continuously spells things out for the audience in dialogue, there are those candidly pure and poetic moments of their own longing and remorse that tap into a rare cerebral humanity enacted on the essence of the moment, and considering we’re given such a minimalized opportunity to invest in these characters from the word go, it’s a testament to Farrell and Robbie’s influence in screen presence that they’re able to attain any kind of empathetic endearing for these characters, with each of them adapting seamlessly to the furthest extremes of the tonal plausibility in ways that make them equally effective at drama or humor. Beyond Farrell and Robbie, the film also has an exceptional supporting ensemble featuring Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Lily Rabe, to name a few, and though only Rabe truly steals a scene from one of her leading actors, each of them merit so much personality to their limited depiction, especially Rabe, who as Sarah’s mother grips audiences with the movie’s most intensely endearing moment.

NEGATIVES

When a film is described as strangely surreal, it can mean a lot to the eyes of the beholder, but for my own personal engagement, I found the film’s baffling execution to feel constantly compromising to the story that it was attempting to tell, particularly with some of the year’s most obvious and meandering dialogue that unnaturally orchestrates interaction between characters, without anything in the way of nuance or subtlety to surmise soul to the dynamic. Many movies anymore unfortunately attain such an artificial embodiment towards feeling like their dialogue is being conjured from a screenwriter off-stage, rather than within the integrity of the characters, but only with this film does that aspect enact predictability in the outcomes of these scenes, long before we’ve ever had a chance to even experience them alongside the characters, and it not only undercuts the opportunity at indulging within these various conversations throughout a dialogue-heavy engagement, but it also dramatically undercuts the magnetism in the romantic dynamic between David and Sarah, scoring no semblance of romantics to a movie dominantly featuring it. While I’ve heard many other moviegoers assess that Farrell and Robbie have great chemistry with one another, I strongly feel that the charisma from each fools outsiders into thinking there’s something palpably permeating between them, but I found nothing even remotely synthetic or believable about what they’re delivering on-screen, besides friendship, especially since they’re rarely shown to be physically intimate with one another, and it just makes the obvious intention of the film’s final objective feel tacked-on and insignificant to the rest of the film, especially in that the foundation of their entire relationship features them persisting through their most vulnerable of moments from the past, in order to make up for the inexperience of knowing each other for a whole day in the present. If this isn’t enough, it’s difficult to openly embrace a dynamic that is so glaringly evident to be doomed from the start, whether in David’s own inability to feel comfortable in a loving situation, or Sarah’s introduction to the audience conveying to David that she will inevitably cheat on him, even if everything is copacetic about their relationship. On top of this, the framing device of casually persisting through these moments does attain unearthed knowledge about the characters and their respective pasts, but are so arduously paced and imbalanced, between moments of drama and moments of humor, that make the movie’s 104-minute runtime feel like two hours, all the while answering very little about this mysterious company or how any of this is possible. It’s annoying enough that the door is the most obvious metaphor that you could possibly summon for such a portal into the past, but it’s even worse that the movie just sort of expects audiences to go along with the quirky saccharine of wall-breaking moments that couldn’t keep me from constantly cringing, and it leaves a complete lack of honesty or transparency with so many of these tender moments, especially in feeling so out of Kogonada’s realm of comfort with his aforementioned two other films. Finally, while most of the production choices are free from blame, the desire to utilize a soundtrack of mellow folk music, instead of taking advantage of a talented composer like Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron) is unforgiveable, especially considering the rare instances that we get to experience the same kind of dreamy instrumentals that emit a glowing radiance to the intoxicating imagery. Considering Hisaishi has never worked on an American-helmed film before, makes the opportunity to include him one of obvious value to a film’s presentational originality, but unfortunately the glimpses into unconventional instruments such as ukuleles or wind instruments are constantly put on the backburner for lyric-heavy tracks doubling as exposition for the script’s flimsy characterization, leaving Hisaishi regretful for why he ever left the comforts of being Studio Ghibli’s most instrumental architect.

OVERALL
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” offers a visual treat of a fantastical world alongside such charmingly soulful performances from Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, but ultimately is a monotonously meandering attempt to flourish something sentimental out of something saccharine, leading to a film that is strange in the worst meaning of the term. While one door opens with Kogonada seeking out his most ambitious opportunity, to date, one door closes with the artificiality and exaggeration of the intention eviscerating the depth from the drama, resulting in an arduously exhausting journey that will have you constantly asking “Are we there yet?”

My Grade: 5.1 or D+