‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’: Fanciful script, staid helming

This Black List screenplay by Seth Reiss made it to production with indie hotshot Kogonada (‘Columbus’, ‘After Yang’) helming it and the resultant is too schmaltzy and treacly.

‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ is about Sarah (Robbie) and David (Farrell), single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and through a surprising twist in the tale, find themselves together, reliving important moments from their respective pasts.

Sarah travels back into her past, illuminating moments that have guided her to become pessimistic about relationships. David, a lonely soul she met at a wedding and had a mild flirtation with, gets reunited with her on a road trip engineered by magical GPS. Towards the end, both reconcile themselves to their hang-ups and traumas.

We meet David when he is forced to rent a vehicle to get to his friend’s wedding. The rental agency is a warehouse run by two agents (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) with two identical cars with strange GPS systems. David drives away with one of the cars and Sarah is the customer for the second — both trying to get to the same wedding.

Satnav, the strange, mystical GPS system, has Sarah and David going through several doors before they can heal. David is transported back to high school, where he agonises over a girl in his school play. One of the doors that Sarah goes through takes her back to the scene of her mother’s death and the guilt she experiences for not being there because she was too busy carrying on with a professor. Many such memories come to the fore but nothing is to be gained by them. The flat dialogue and indistinct performances make it all rather trivial.

The film is rather shallow in its psychological and emotional insights. Regret, grief, fear of commitment, bad habits, insecurities and relationship issues come in for cursory inspection. After coming to terms with all that, the two commitment-phobes, David and Sarah, must decide if they want to be together.

This film is also tonally inconsistent. The audience remains indifferent to David and Sarah’s issues. Both Farrell and Robbie seem to be going through the motions without feeling it.

The film doesn’t manage to engage with genuine emotion. The main characters go through the motions in a background filled with saturated colours. The green in the sweeping vistas of California’s rolling hills is the only thing that looks genuine here. There are many inconsistencies. The fanciful script required a director with greater imagination and flair. Kogonada, as it turns out, was just not the right fit with his staid helming.

It is really difficult to suspend your disbelief without emotional attachment to what is transpiring on-screen. This romantic fantasy fails to make its against-the-odds love story emotionally potent or alluring enough.