The Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey  (15) |Close-Up Film Review

This exercise in magical realism is a romance between Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell), two strangers who meet at a wedding. 

The story starts though when David, late for the wedding, finds his car clamped.  Very conveniently however pinned to the wall is a handwritten ad for a car rental company. 

It’s a weird one – just two people (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline) sitting at a table in a huge, otherwise empty warehouse.  They quiz him in an odd manner, offer him a car with special GPS and off he goes to the wedding.

It’s raining heavily.  I think that’s symbolic in this film of when a character has lost his or her way.  However David finds the wedding, meets Sarah, they chat a bit rather awkwardly and part. 

But then the magic starts.  Her car won’t start, he offers her a lift and we’re off on the magic journey.  They drive through pretty landscapes, and find odd doors standing in the middle of nowhere. They are doors into their pasts – sometimes his, sometimes hers and on the other side of the door they each live again but in their present bodies and in the presence of the other, events in their past which have created the lives they now have.

Early on Sarah relives the death of her mother, from which she has never recovered. 

More amusingly David finds himself back at high school taking part in a production of How to Succeed in Business.  The point of the sequence is he makes a fool of himself declaring his love for a girl who’s not interested.  The interest of the section though is Farrell as a musical comedy actor.  He’s rather good – and the standard for a high school production is amazingly high.  My goodness, they must all be professional actors! 

And so it goes on, as David and Sarah recreate formative moments from their respective histories – the sort of events which in real life might emerge in conversation as a couple in a relationship explore each other’s experience.   The sequences vary in effectiveness.  One of the best is when both Sarh and David re-enact together the break up with their previous partners.  But the one when adult Sarha reverts to her childhood dependency on her mother is just a bit embarrassing.  And some of them just aren’t very interesting.

Farrell comes out of it best, showing a decent sense of European reserve – although David went to American high school, he’s really Irish, we’re told.  Whereas American Sarah just lets it all ang out.  I was more intrigued by the two agents of the car hire  company from the land of weird. I could have done with more of them and less of this rather soppy wallow around the somewhat obvious fact that it is our past actions which have created the life we are living now.

To be fair to the film however, it does look very beautiful and as a couple Farrell and Robbie are rather appealing.  So if you’re a true romantic, rather than a cynical old film critic, you may well enjoy it.