Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

After being disappointed by HIM yesterday, I was hoping that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey would be able to defeat its lackluster Letterboxd rating, and for honestly some of the same reasons, it couldn’t get the job done. It boggles my mind a little bit that the Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie-led sweeping romance didn’t work out, because it totally should have.

Where the film seemed to go wrong first was in its dialogue, one of the suboptimal traits it shared with HIM. The interactions between Sarah and David switched between overly dry and trying too hard to be profound or mystical, even. The opening scene between them at the wedding was so weird and didn’t endear me to their love story. There were certainly parts of the film later on that did, but we got off on the wrong foot.

The story also was very messy, bouncing from moment to moment without a lot of explanation or acknowledgement of the odd world the characters suddenly found themselves in, where there are random doors to past traumas sprinkled throughout “the city”. It’s unfortunate that the presentation of this story was so uneven, because there were some moments that really, really worked.

I loved when Sarah and David recreated David’s high school play and heartbreak, and the scene where Sarah asked her mom to “pretend she was older” was fantastic as well. Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie are two much too talented actors to be forced to meander through this script and try to wring something meaningful out of it.

There were numerous moments of solid filmmaking and emotional storytelling—vibrant color grading and a lush Joe Hisaishi score to boot—but A Big Bold Beautiful Journey couldn’t quite figure out how to fit all the pieces together. This is the type of story that I feel like would work much better as a book—the jumps would be less jarring, the structure easier to follow, and all the cringy dialogue less assaulting. Too bad it’s not a book.