The Korean-American director Kogonada’s (big, bold and beautiful) journey to directing a mid-budget film starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell is an interesting one. Coming from the world of video essays, where he analysed the likes of Robert Bresson, Breaking Bad, Yasujiro Ozu and Richard Linklater, not just for YouTube but also commissioned work for Sight and Sound and The Criterion Collection.
He eventually picked up filmmaking with 2017’s Columbus, a delicate film about the beauty of architecture and connection, two people sharing an interest that binds them in more ways than they could know. This was then followed up by a Colin Farrell-led sci-fi film, After Yang, which felt just as meticulous and sensitive despite its larger ambitions and deeply existential themes.
These all lead to A Big Bold Beautiful Journey as Kogonada’s most commercial film yet, as he re-teams with Colin Farrell, nabs Margot Robbie in her first post-Barbie role, works with a major studio and directs a script from The Menu’s Seth Reiss instead of his own. A long way from YouTube videos about Robert Bresson, right?
David (Colin Farrell) is a single, middle-aged (and most importantly, Irish) man on his way to a wedding. As he interacts with an absurd car rental company and a lovingly awkward meet-cute with Sarah (Margot Robbie, manic pixie dream girl-ing arguably more than she did in Babylon) at the wedding, the HAL-9000-inspired GPS in the car asks if he wants to embark on a “big, bold, beautiful journey”. David’s depressed self somehow says “yes” and unfolds into a fantastical odyssey of the past and self-confrontation with Sarah, who seems to be linked on his same path of pre-destination.
The most obvious reference in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. While that film quirked and self-depricated the end of a relationship, using the Kafka-esque odyssey of self-confrontation to rekindle it, the film is much more earnest and quirky as it runs through foundational points in both David and Sarah’s lives, exposing the best and worst of them before they choose to commit to each other.
Kogonada directs this handsomely with the evenly paced visual language carried over from his previous films, even if it does create some friction with the film’s more conventional and commercial ambitions. There are some overt indie-leaning needle drops, sharp tone shifts and beats of dialogue that wish to be subtle and less conventional but can’t be due to the structure this film works in…. Yet I was charmed by the ambition and earnest intentions constantly on display.
This is mostly due in part to the performances. Farrell has this way of acting that never feels studied or adjacent to a performance, but he’s excavating his soul and putting it on full display for an audience, bringing a humanistic quality to a character that the people might call “an avoidant man”. Robbie as Sarah, his romantic counterpart, skews more quirky and impulsive as a foil to David’s measured self, and even as their opening interactions come off as awkward due to this clash in personality, Robbie’s Sarah becomes more endearing as her performative shield slowly comes down, as Farrell’s David expands into open-hearted communication.
The colourful, often symmetrical images are also complemented with a score, and it’s one of the best ones you’ll hear all year since it’s done by frequent Hayao Miyazaki collaborator, Joe Hisaishi, in his first time composing for an American film. Anyone familiar with his work in Japanese cinema will know what to expect with his soulful string sections and wistful pianos working their way into this story, as it often stops and allows the audience to take in its visual splendour and emotional complexities, as Kogonada films usually do.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is often too messy and tonally inconsistent to land its bigger emotional wallops in the third act as it wrestles between the worlds of independent filmmaking and commercial filmmaking. It’s really no surprise that it is currently being marketed like a Coleen Hoover adaptation rather than a quirky romance, but in between its stylistic tensions, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey finds saccharine, relatable and heartwarming moments underneath everything it covers and a bold reminder that we can escape our cycles, find our child-like selves and hope again. In a pivotal scene, David tells Sarah, “I’d rather feel nervous with you than feel nothing alone.” Beyond being advice that I think I needed to hear, it sums up my relationship with this film pretty well.
★★★ 1/2
In cinemas September 19th / Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, Billy Magnussen, Kevin Kline / Dir: Kogonada / Sony, Columbia Pictures / 15
Related
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
