A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: passion takes a backseat in this earnest modern love story

There is a degree to which Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey preempts some of its critics with its title. It’s difficult for people to lambast a film for wearing its heart ostentatiously on its sleeve when it signposts such intent so clearly. But A Big Bold Beautiful Journey promises a little more than the film is able to deliver. Rather than a sweeping romance, Kogonada and his stars have crafted an earnest and heartfelt modern love story, albeit one lacking in ardour.

Colin Farrell plays David (having previously working with the director on 2021’s After Yang) and Margot Robbie is Sarah, two lonely individuals who are afraid to commit. They both end up using an unconventional car hire service to travel to a wedding several hundred miles away. The car rental company – staffed by the oddball duo of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline – feels like something from I Heart Huckabees (2004) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), but the resulting trip is not quite as left-field. Having met and flirted at the wedding, the GPS in their respective cars (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) encourages them each to go on a journey together. And so they end up wandering through fairytale doors in the landscape to explore stagey reenactments of their respective histories in fantastical, magical realist fashion.

That central conceit, in which Sarah and David navigate their pasts together, baring their deepest wounds and rewriting their most painful memories, is both charming and resonant. It takes the very real interior process of revealing ourselves to potential partners and externalises them. Psychological hang-ups become theatrical set-pieces that can be rewritten and re-performed in tandem. In coming to know each other intimately, they open themselves to sharing their heartache. It’s a very modern concern – how much a romantic partner will support our own growth and self-understanding. But the process also feels like working through baggage rather than falling head over heels. It’s as though we’re sitting in on couples therapy.

That said, Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie have fantastic chemistry. From their initial flirty scenes at the wedding where they refuse to give each other an inch, to their gradual acquiescence to the idea that sharing their lives – even for a short while – would be worth the risk, their relationship is both convincing and endearing. Given that chemistry, though, one can’t help but feel that we’ve missed out on the chance for a big, bold, beautiful love story that could have really lit up the screen. 

► A Big Bold and Beautiful Journey is in UK cinemas now.