With Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie on board I was ready to go wherever their new romantic film A Big Bold Beautiful Journey wants to take me. It is in fact a bit of a fantasy trip where two strangers find themselves on a path to their pasts in the hopes it may help unlock a happier future. They do this by opening freestanding doors in the middle of fields that lead to different periods in each of their lives.
It is all put in motion by a quirky couple that David (Farrell) discovers on an ad for a car-rental agency. It turns out this is the first door he has to navigate, and once he finally does he sees a vast warehouse with its proprietors in the distance, the mechanic (Kevin Kline) and cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who do a sales job on a car rental that will change his life — especially the GPS, which guides him into an alter-world he can’t access on his own, a HAL-like computer system that has big plans for both David and Sarah (Robbie), the single woman he meets a wedding where after a few minutes she facetiously proposes. It isn’t serious; she is clearly guarded and shy of any relationship at the moment, definitely anything that requires commitment. Both have that in common. In no time (but it feels like an hour), this pair are in the 1994 Saturn SL on their way to, uh, their own past lives.
First stop is a 19th century lighthouse where David had spent some special time many years before. Then it is Sarah’s turn at an art museum with great meaning to her. They then embark to David’s high school where at age 15 he had the lead of J. Pierpont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He is his actual age only to Sarah, as everyone else in the school and audience sees him as the teen he once was. However, this was a traumatic production for David, who was also trying to profess his love to his young co-star, but she isn’t having it. What morphs from actual production numbers from the show to his own lovesick meltdown onstage upon the rejection by his crush is that this grown man still hasn’t gotten over it, and just ambles through life carefully avoiding falling in love again.
There are also key scenes for both set in hospitals. One cleverly has David meeting his father (Hamish Linklater) in the waiting room of the hospital where he was born prematurely. Another has Sarah rushing to be by the side of her dying mother (Lily Rabe), but as she explained it was something in real life that never happened; she was “screwing” her professor as her mother died alone. It launched a lifetime of regret, but can it all be fixed for both of them in this exercise of romantic surrealism?
Director Kogonada, who previously guided Farrell in After Yang, is going for alternate melancholy and whimsy, an uneven blend of introspective drama and high-concept fantasy that feels a bit lost in translation and doesn’t quite work the way it was intended. Something seems to be missing in this very deliberately slow-paced reflection on the pitfalls of the past and the possibilities of the future. It connects occasionally — especially in the high school sequence, which livens things up considerably — but too often it fails to engage and is overly talky.
Certainly it is not the fault of our stars, with both Farrell and Robbie exhibiting fine chemistry as they try to make screenwriter Seth Reiss’ less than compelling dialogue and characters pop on screen. Farrell and Robbie have chemistry; the problem is David and Sarah aren’t convincing in terms of their attraction, however measured along the way, to each other. Add in the constant rain, balloons and colorful umbrellas that seem right out of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and you have a visual palette that alternates between the dark and the light. Benjamin Loeb did the superb cinematography, and the score by ace Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi tries valiantly to catch the mood.
As a classic love story the bones are there, but too much is on the shoulders of the two leads to try and make this fly. Farrell especially is quite fine here, but so is Robbie as they attempt to make these very reluctant would-be lovers somehow come together. We don’t always feel it.
For the most part the rest of the cast has little to do, but Kline and Waller-Bridge give it a go in their limited screen time. Ultimately though, this is a two-hander on a journey to the center of the heart. Unfortunately, that heart isn’t beating nearly enough. I really wanted to like this one a lot more than I did.
Producers are Bradley Thomas, Ryan Friedkin, Youree Henley and Reiss.
Title: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Release date: September 19, 2025
Director: Kogonada
Screenwriter: Seth Reiss
Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 48 mins