A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Having quietly astonished with debut feature Columbus, then made conceptually compelling drama After Yang, Kogonada continues tackling ineffable themes like love and death in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Here the Seoul-born American director brings back Yang star Colin Farrell, teaming him with Margot Robbie for an unusually downbeat, fantasy-pocked love story.

After flirting auspiciously at a wedding, David (Farrell) and Sarah (Robbie), meet at a motorway restaurant before driving off together guided by David’s chatty GPS (fellow Yang veteran Jodie Turner-Smith). They stop at a series of doors in the countryside which teleport them to places and moments that have helped define their lives. When they arrive at David’s teenage high-school performance of musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, the memory of a girl who broke his heart causes an on-stage outpouring of angst (and some serious jazz hands). They visit the hospital where Sarah’s mother died of cancer, though at the time it really happened she was 19 and selfishly absent, having an affair with her college professor. David also has his share of unlikeable qualities, especially when depicted breaking up with his former fiancée. Such relationship inadequacies help explain why both are perpetually single – even if such a fine-looking pair being alone is less credulous than the duo using magic doors to time-travel into the bodies of their younger selves.

Tonally and formally, it doesn’t gel. The playfulness of, say, Big Fish is combined awkwardly with the bracing emotional honesty of something like Manchester By The Sea. That it’s wrapped up in a plot similar to Scrooged but occasionally as minimally staged as Dogville makes it all the more puzzling. Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s parts as rental care hire staff (the latter with a bizarre German accent) seem left over from another film, too. Robbie and Farrell are engaging but otherwise, it’s a bit too confused to recommend.