(courtesy IMP Awards)
If there’s one thing you likely shouldn’t do before you go to see a movie, it’s check out what one of the review aggregation sites is saying about it.
Sure, it can be good to read the sites and avoid a real lemon, and that can be good for the soul, time not misspent and your wallet, but there’s also something to be said, and I say this as someone hurtling up to the ripe old age of 60 who remembers ye olden decades of yore, for just heading to the cinema and hoping for the best.
That’s not quite what happened here; tickets were booked, catch-up with a friend arranged, and an escape from the hellhole of the workaday world set in motion, and then for reasons that escape me now, one of those sites was checked where it became apparent that a lot of critics did not like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
Still, the trailer looked good and this reviewer is a sucker for a clever rom-com, and so the booking was honoured with a sense that maybe this would be a turkey but it could still be wholly rich and engaging too and maybe I was just in the right mindset to properly appreciate it.
Now the thing is that the film by director Kogonada and screenwriter Seth Reiss may not be the absolute greatest film ever made, and likely won’t reach the upper echelons of the rom-com pantheon, but far from being a film you need to grin and bear it through and which you regret seeing the moment you leave the cinema, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is actually all the feels rolled into a reasonably meaningful film.
The movie centres around two people who meet at a wedding where they are both single entities – David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are enjoying the wedding of a lovely mutual friend but as it always is when you’re alone at someone’s nuptials, there’s a melancholy that tinges all the dancing and celebrating.
Both people acknowledge it but neither is willing to act on it, although David seems to be more open to talking and spending time with Sarah than vice-versa with Sarah guarded and cut off and happy to admit to David that she would not be good for him.
Now at this stage, without the scenes with David that precede it, you might be forgiven for thinking that all their guarded banter and tight but hopeful smiles are simply a standard rom-com meet-cute.
But as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey opens, David finds himself in need of a car at short notice and ends up at a weird car rental agency, simply called A Car Rental Agency, which is fronted by The Mechanic (Kevin Kline) and the Female Cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who sit at the very end of a long, cavernously empty warehouse and who ask all kinds of invasive questions of David who knows this is all very strange but who, for reasons you can see in his eyes and posture he can’t explain, goes along with it anyway.
One of the weirdest parts of a very weird booking process is the Female Cashier’s insistence that David take the GPS option in a very old make and model car that is no longer in production; it’s only later, when David is on the road away from the wedding where he and Sarah have not connected (sorry meet-cute, you did your best!), that the insistence on the GPS becomes clear with David, and as it turns out, Sarah being led on the titular journey that changes both their lives.
At this point, it becomes highly apparent that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has a hefty dose of magical realism at work in its narrative, and while the trailer doesn’t disguise that fact at all, the film rests heavily on what a series of magical doors, out in the middle of forests and fields, could lead for both the leading characters.
In a way, the film is one big dealing-with-your-sh*t therapy session with David and Sarah taken to key moments in their past where decisions are made or personalities shaped or things lost and found.
While many of these excursions into what should should be an impossible to reach past are touching, it’s only in the final act that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey gathers up its armada of emotional impactful scenes and uses them to devastatingly emotional effect.
That’s not to say that the film doesn’t pack an emotional punch earlier on – it does, all while allowing David and Sarah to get to know each other way beyond a first date level and yes, fall in love too; it’s a rom-com after all, albeit a delightfully odd one and falling in love is a non-negotiable part of the package – but it’s in the final act that you really feel what all these blasts from the past have meant for our two unwillingly budding love birds (to be fair, David gets keen while Sarah keeps her arms out to keep him and her feelings for him at bay).
Those final two trips down very painful but ultimately liberating memory lane are exquisitely heart-wrenching and deeply meaningful, and while any number of critics thought this was simply emotional manipulation, if you have ever lost someone or at least a connection to someone, and wanted to desperately have some more time with the, these final scenes will hit you HARD.
Pivoting on an enormously quirky premise and a heavy dose of magical realism, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey could easily have slipped off the rom-com rails into annoyingly too-clever-for-its-good land but it mostly sticks the narrative and emotionally impactful landing, leaving you feeling like you have delved deep in to your soul just as David and Sarah are unexpectedly excavating theirs, and that the hard-won love that makes it present felt in the sweetly thoughtful final scene is absolutely earned, very real and proof that fate can’t be weirdly uncertain and yet end up somewhere very good indeed.
And here’s a snippet of the soundtrack …