The one-named director Kogonada is one of the most promising voices on the come-up today. His past two films, Columbus and After Yang are excellent blendings of the relational and the intellectual-metaphysical. His third film just hit theaters, and it’s the first one he hasn’t written himself (or that explores Asian-ness). That film is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie.
The film is somewhere in the neighborhood of Charlie Kauffman, just past Stranger Than Fiction and abutting the sprawling whimsical romance complex. Two strangers end up renting cars under mysterious circumstances from more-than-mysterious salespeople, and their GPS units bring them together to heal their self-sabotaging ways. The soundtrack is full of songs by Bright Eyes and the like, but they all call attention to themselves, sadly.
The dialogue is unexpected and sometimes great, and both actors navigate it with charm. (As usual, Hollywood feeds us a love story between a 49-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman, but they are both beautiful enough to seem ageless.) There are some wonderful bits of fun as well as feeling, and the film looks lovely. However, it never really congeals.
Interesting concepts and situations abound, and each would make a good film, but there isn’t room in this town for all of them. The thematic strand which I took most to was one about how “sometimes in life, you need to perform a little to get at the truth.” It is touched on several times, but it eventually falls away, leaving the film to explore the importance of contentment. Throughout, meet-cutes, musical numbers, time travel, body-swapping, and more gradually build up a wall that blocks our view of the film’s core.
I still liked it, but my enjoyment cooled as it progressed. I love the idea of a Kogonada magic-real romantic comedy…but perhaps it is the fact that he did not write the script that creates the feeling that he is a bit baffled himself by the material. I have no problem with inscrutability, and these are both actors I would watch peel vegetables. But there are too many dangling promises of coherence to make the movie ultimately satisfying. If, however, you’re willing to settle for “fun,” you could find many worse ways to spend two hours of your day.