In A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) attended a mutual friend’s wedding as single people, happy to head out on their own. Below the surface of these two beautiful people, who are both happy to tout their enjoyment of taking trips alone, lie different kinds of trauma that are stopping them from finding a partner. Various fears and feelings cause them to shy away from people. But thanks to a special car GPS and some magical journeys, they get the chance to unpack all of this.
When David attempts to head to the wedding at the start of the film, his car is clamped, so he heads to a car rental service. They’re odd right away, with two people and two cars, sitting in the middle of a giant warehouse. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is playing one of the two characters, with a thick, ridiculous German accent and all the swear words in the movie, alongside a quieter and more subdued Kevin Kline. They implore the addition of a car GPS, which David takes. At the wedding, he bumps into Sarah and, very obviously, finds her stunning, but fumbles the moment when she asks if he dances. The next day, however, a chance arises when his GPS — voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith by the way — asks if he would like to “go on a big bold beautiful journey” and he says he does. Well, he shouts it after several pushes for a better performance from the GPS. And this sends him bumping back into Sarah, her car broken down, the two now on the big, bold, beautiful journey together.
At each place the GPS leads them, they arrive at a seemingly abandoned area, but a door is located nearby, off the main road, which leads to different moments in David and Sarah’s lives. It begins with an introduction to how the doors will work, a trip to a Canadian lighthouse, and a beautiful moment David took for himself, alone, now with company. But from her we start moving through more serious moments in the two’s live and get a better idea of their history and what shaped them into the people they are today, like David’s high school musical that ends with asking out his dream girl for him to turn him down, or visiting a musuem that Sarah loves because of its history to her deceased mother and how much she loved visiting it.
It’s when the doors begin exploring moments from their lives in a non-factual way that the characters can interact with each other and delve deeper into their feelings and unexplored emotions in ways they weren’t able to in the earlier, set-dressing explorations of historical parts in their biography. When Sarah enters the hospital the night that her mother — an exceptional Lily Rabe — has just passed away, she notes she wasn’t there in reality when her mother passed away. She wasn’t there by her side, and she didn’t come to the hospital that night. But now she has a chance to explore the moment she was scared of experiencing.
This fear of what holds us back from doing things is the core theme of A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey. The moments we miss because we’re scared of what someone will say, or what we’ll feel deep inside. And for these two characters in particular, the fear of not knowing what will happen if they’re in a relationship. The message seems clear that it’s not about knowing what’ll happen, but rather about simply exploring and being better off feeling something than nothing.
Matching the somewhat magical and mystical tone of a film that can feel like its playing in a more light-tone Charlie Kaufman world, is returning collabertors with director Kogonada in Benjamin Loeb photographing beautifully, while Arjun Bhasin delivers with the costume design; the simple, yet again, somewhat otherworldly nature of what Robbie and Farrell are wearing in this film has been stuck in my mind since the trailers. However, the star behind the scenes here is the sensational original score by Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who is most known for his work on Studio Ghibli films. It marks A Big Beautiful Journey as his first work on a Hollywood film.
