Kogonada understands film. When you understand film at a deep level, and you make a film, sometimes the construction and making of the thing is more interesting than watching the thing. That’s how it goes with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — a highly constructed film — where the filmmaking foundations build a sturdy support for the purpose of making a conceptually structured film.
When effort is visible on screen, the act of filmmaking becomes something less than it has the potential to be. It becomes just an act of art for art’s sake. Something to make but not to watch. For Kogonada, the act of filmmaking is itself academic, and it follows that his high concept romance is more interested in the machinations of its design, than in the interior lives of its characters and what happens in-between the broad strokes of the overarching design.
The architecture of the piece is a big bold beautiful journey for two lost souls who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and are guided on a journey through literal doorways of their pasts, as directed by an absurdist car rental company that has provided both parties with GPS devices that send the duo on a romantic roadtrip through past traumas, loves, missed connections, and unresolved familial drama. Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) start as strangers but are about to undertake a metaphorical tour through all the touch points of really getting to know someone in a relationship.
Wilco’s “You and I” — “You and I, we might be strangers / But no matter how close we get / It’s like we never met,” propels the early honeymoon stage of the road trip, and shows the movie for what it is, a well-curated design of good taste awkwardly compiled into a movie that reads like: Eternal Sunshine of the Academic Mind. What’s missing is that in a film of big ideas, there are few small moments to meaningfully connect the heady themes.
Robbie & Farrell are typically reliable and despite some tension, mostly in the script, bring certain nuances and individual fragments of psychology to their performances. They are both good and Kogonada is good too. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is several things but most of all it’s thoughtfully constructed, perhaps to the detriment of a romance which could develop, not only through the big moments in life, but more shared experiences, so we might understand what the characters mean to each other. Yet, it’s a good looking film, well-acted, and while not as resonant as Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021), finds a true filmmaker at work in Kogonada, playing with form and function for the sake of creating something new.