Dear “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,”
It’s always flattering when a movie opens its heart to you, like Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill,” standing in front of an audience, asking the audience to love it. I respect that you had the courage to make such an emotional and public show of affection. Not every movie does. Heck, not every movie tries. These days, a lot of movies barely have any emotions at all.
Unfortunately, the feeling isn’t mutual. It would be polite to say “It’s not you, it’s me” but you say you believe in sincerity, so I’ll be sincere in return. It’s you. It’s definitely you. Thank you for offering up your heart, but like an ill-advised organ transplant between a human being and a Komodo dragon, I think rejection was probably inevitable.
What can I say, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey?” You lost me early on. You gave me Colin Farrell as David, an attractive man with no character trait besides “unhappily single,” and Margot Robbie as Sarah, an attractive woman with the same character trait for slightly different reasons. It probably seemed like a slam dunk, hiring these two wonderful and magnetic performers in your romantic fantasy. But you did have to give them something meaningful to perform. Otherwise they’re just standing on screen, trying to make the most of a trifle. Sometimes they succeed, sure, but “sometimes” is a small fraction of these 109 minutes.
David and Sarah meet at a wedding, but before that they needed rental cars, and they each wound up at the world’s twee-est rental car service, where Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are quirky weirdos who say quirky things, quirkily. David and Sarah each get an old Saturn with an old GPS device, which guides them — after their “meet generic” (in which two characters are introduced to each other with no humor or drama, i.e. the reason “meet cutes” were invented) — on a long road trip home, in which they encounter a series of randomly-placed magical doors which lead to memorable events in each other’s pasts.
Your thesis, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” which you practically yell by the way — just like you make Colin Farrell literally yell the title — is that we have to, like, open doors and stuff. This movie is about falling in love by opening magical doors and it has “Let My Love Open the Door” on the soundtrack, and not tucked away at the end of the credits. It’s in one of the most dramatic scenes. There’s sincere and then there’s blunt, and like a lifelong stoner who receives a doobie the size of a schoolbus as a birthday present, I appreciate the thought, but that’s too much blunt, even for me.
So David and Sarah have learn to let someone into their lives, freely and honestly, by telling each other all the good stuff and all the bad stuff, all at once. That should be sweet. The problem is, David and Sarah don’t really have “bad stuff.” Their problems are sympathetic, perhaps, but they just aren’t that bad. Everybody feels like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and everyone has baggage to overcome. But when the protagonists of your story require divine or magical intervention to resolve their issues, their issues had better be worth it.
George Bailey was at the end of his rope in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” so much so that we believe it when an angel has to step in and sort him out. David and Sarah’s problems are so unremarkable that not only could they be resolved with a few weeks of therapy, frankly, I think a single trip to an astute fake psychic could have fixed most of their hangups. When a movie presents a world where affluent, pretty people who’ve never known real suffering are on the radar of angels, or aliens, or whatever the heck Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are playing, it’s not reassuring. It’s insulting to people who have actual hardships, and who those same demigods have deemed, inexplicably, unworthy of grace.
It would be one thing, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” if you took place in a simplistic fantasy world where everything’s OK. Just a place an audience can visit to escape their troubles. But you seem to be convinced that your characters have serious issues which are terribly dramatic and important. Sad memories about your parents are real, and damn near universal. No arguments there. A scene where Colin Farrell meets his father at the hospital on the day he was born, and his father is played by Hamish Linklater and he’s a perfect 10 on the talent scale for a several blissful minutes in a row, that’s a scene that connects. That scene is soulful. But that’s because unlike David, David’s father is dealing with a serious problem, as opposed to having a few bumps in the road while trying to date Margot Robbie.
Most movies are trying to be movies. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” it seems like you want to be an impressionable audience member’s whole personality. You make general statements about the wonders of life, with as much cinematic oomph as one of those “Hang in there!” posters of a kitten in a tree. The implication isn’t that the kitten is going to fall into a bed of spikes. The implication is that the kitten will probably be fine. David and Sarah are both kittens. If they don’t end up together, they will also be fine. So we have zero investment. Which leaves us with very little except the film’s mawkish, Etsy-flavored oddness on which to cling, and it isn’t terribly odd at all.
You’ve put me in an awkward position, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” because your story advocates for earnest declarations of love, and that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re earnestly asking an audience to love you. Which means if we don’t fall in love with you, our only option is to reject you. You can’t be “just friends” with someone begging in public for a lifelong romantic commitment. So I’m afraid this is it for us. I admire you for trying to make it work, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” but I think we should both see other films.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” opens exclusively in theaters on Sept. 19.