½ ★ (½ out of 4)
I’ve always hated whimsy, which the Oxford Dictionary defines, kindly, as “playfully quaint or fanciful behavior.” I define it as cloying goo that triggers my gag reflex, which conveniently defines what goes on in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a movie without commas or a sense of shame about how awful it is to endure this big bold beautiful botch job.
Let me say right off that this is surprising. Kogonada, the mono-named South Korean-born video essayist who wrote and directed two acclaimed indie features in “Columbus” and “After Yang,” should know better. What did he see in the screenplay by Seth Reiss other than its prominent placement on the Black List, a platform dedicated to empowering writers?
[It's] a movie without commas or a sense of shame about how awful it is to endure this big bold beautiful botch job.
Did anyone really read this thing? Or did they think the A-list razzle dazzle of Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell would blind them to this sinkhole of an experiment. Robbie and Farrell play strangers who meet cute at a wedding and then push through a magic door to the past (is this “Outlander”?) to relive moments that caused them misery and pain. You’ll soon know the feeling.
The plot is unbearably cutesy. David (Farrell) rents a car to get to a wedding. The rental service, run by the overqualified and underused Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline, offers a Saturn with a wonky GPS equipped with a magic realism button or something like that. When David locks eyes with fellow single Sarah (that’s Robbie), he’s attracted but a little scared that there might be something off about her. There are indications, trust me.
Next day, they go their separate ways in separate rental cars. At a rest stop, David discovers Sarah with her car on the fritz and a need for a ride. So why not go road-tripping through time and space, where portals to the past are as common as charging stations and a good way to relive their big bold beautiful mistakes? People repeat the words “big bold beautiful” so often, you could play a drinking game that would keep you off the road for days.
One door leads David back to high school, where he sings and dances to showtunes from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (he’s good), remembers a lost love and fights with his father (Hamish Linklater). Bummer. Sarah’s door leads her back to the bed of her dying mother (Lily Rabe) and the guilt she felt over neglecting her for screwing around with a professor. Double bummer.
Behind the breakup door—that’s what I’m calling it—David recalls splitting with his fiancée (Sarah Gadon) as we watch Sarah ghosting and giving the heave-ho to sweet Billy Magnussen. No actor has a part that is even glancingly well written and that includes Robbie and Farrell who have the panicky look of actors trapped in an improv exercise they don’t know how to end.
Though the movie bursts with big bold beautiful colors, the kind where people carry pastel umbrellas right out of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” it spends a lot of time flashing back to angsty moments before it switches gears to hardsell the idea that love is the answer.
Too little and too late, if you ask me. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” did something like this 20 years ago, but that Jim Carrey/Kate Winslet spellbinder did it brilliantly and without the self-satisfied whimsy that sinks this one like a stone. You’ve been warned.