REVIEW: ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ is large, daring and sappy

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When you’ve made two small, beautiful films which have delighted critics and received over discerning audiences, I suppose you’ve earned the best to blow all that credit score on a big-budget romantic fantasy. But, hoo boy, is “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” a chance – a rom-com with the “com” changed by metaphysical meanderings by way of a pair’s purple psychic reminiscences.

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Like many long-shot rolls of the cube, it’s a film that generally cuts to the core of human feeling and generally has an viewers cringing at its achingly whimsical pretensions. Depending on how you are feeling about such issues, it is going to land on the knife-edge of kitsch or tumble off both aspect into highly effective emotional fact or laughable corn.

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The Korean American filmmaker who goes by the identify Kogonada is the one throwing coronary heart and soul and CGI landscapes on the display screen. He beforehand made “Columbus” (2017), a fragile two-hander starring John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson and the structure of Columbus, Indiana, and “After Yang” (2021), a terrific day-after-tomorrow drama a few household mourning its home robotic. That movie’s star, Colin Farrell, returns in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” as David, a good-looking loner travelling from an unnamed metropolis to a marriage within the countryside and compelled on the final minute to hire a automotive from a really unusual rental company.

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The company is staffed by Kevin Kline (wanting sweetly distracted) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (with a German accent), and so they could also be angels, I don’t know. David’s automotive has a magic GPS, voiced by Farrell’s “After Yang” co-star Jodie Turner-Smith, that sends him on a “large, daring, lovely journey” together with Sarah (Margot Robbie), a lady he flirted with on the wedding ceremony. Sarah has additionally rented a automotive from the Very Strange Rental Agency, however it conveniently stalls, forcing the pair to journey collectively into all kinds of symbolic dramas and doorways to the previous, none of which they discover notably uncommon.

Some film romances with supernatural gimmicks (see “The Time Traveler’s Wife” or “The Lake House”) make an effort to maintain one foot in actuality. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is braver and extra foolhardy than that. When David and Sarah are guided to their first vacation spot, it’s a door standing by itself in a verdant discipline; handed by way of, it results in a coastal lighthouse with a Maxfield Parrish sundown, the place the 2 are invited to pause and absorb the fantastic thing about the second.

Further doorways will result in David’s highschool years, an artwork museum the place Sarah usually went along with her late mom (Lily Rabe), a hospital, a diner the place they confront their respective fears of intimacy, and different levels for psychological traumas and breakthroughs. Some of those scenes work marvelously, like a highschool theatre manufacturing of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” with the grownup David reinhabiting his teenage self, or a scene through which he comforts his father (Hamish Linklater) at a essential juncture within the older man’s life. Others really feel like steps in a self-help guide.

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Farrell and Robbie give the perfect performances they’ll, on condition that their characters are allegories quite than folks. They convey movie-star attraction and rueful wit to screenwriter Seth Reiss’s dialogue, which has an earnest snap however errs on the aspect of therapy-speak. (“You liked some model of me that’s not me”; “I’d quite really feel nervous with you than nothing alone.”) They’re actually nice to have a look at, and the cinematography (Benjamin Loeb), manufacturing design (Katie Byron), costumes (Arjun Bhasin) and particular results (Jeremy Hays) all represent eye sweet of the primary rank. The plaintive rating is by Studio Ghibli stalwart Joe Hisaishi, his first for a Hollywood movie.

But profitable, plausible drama is all concerning the subtext, and “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is primarily textual content, writ giant and passionate and with its i’s dotted with hearts. If it’s refreshing for a film to guide this sincerely with its chin, it’s simply as unattainable to not roll one’s eyes on the cheesier moments and on-the-nose soundtrack decisions (“Let My Love Open the Door,” sufficient already).

Kogonada offers us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there might be audiences who might be there for it. But I hope for his subsequent film, he remembers he’s higher at smaller favours.

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Two stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains language. 108 minutes.

Rating information: Four stars masterpiece, three stars excellent, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

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Ty Burr is the writer of the film advice e-newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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