Note: This article contains plot details from ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.’
Filmmakers have long been drawn towards the portrayal of road trips, and have used them as more than just a journey. In films such as ‘Easy Rider‘ and ‘Eternal Sunshine,’ we have witnessed how highways become maps of memory, loss, and the possibility of starting over. This September, the Korean-American auteur Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) is releasing ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,’ starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie.
As per the premiere of the new film, it sounds irresistible, because of the casting of two luminous stars, a script from Seth Reiss from the movie The Menu, and a premise that blends magical realism with bittersweet romance. Although the film stumbles into sentimentality, offering more greeting-card whimsy than lived-in emotional truth.
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell Reunite in Kogonada’s Road Trip of Memory and Grief
The film follows Sarah (Margot Robbie), who is a woman haunted by memories of failed relationships and dreadful family grief. She unexpectedly reconnects with David (Colin Farrell), who is a lonely man she once brushed off after a wedding. But the beauty of destiny, which disguised itself as a retro GPS, unfolds their trip into turns of the uncanny, as each mysterious door along the way unlocks a formative memory they thought long buried. Through these memories, Sarah revisits the death of her mother and her complicated love life, while David relives adolescent heartbreak and youthful insecurities.
But what if a road trip didn’t just take you somewhere new but physically forced you to confront the unresolved corners of your own history? Unfortunately, the execution leans heavily on contrived dialogue and overly tidy resolutions. When David tells Sarah he has booked a table at “your favorite restaurant,” it’s emblematic of the film’s tin ear for natural speech, and instead of sharp, lived-in exchanges, we get lines that sound like placeholders in a draft script.
Kogonada approaches the film with a steady hand, crafting images that feel carefully composed and unmistakably his. He drenches the screen in saturated hues of raincoat yellow, postbox blue, firetruck red. The result is a storybook palette set against California’s shifting hills, alive with green before surrendering to brittle browns, a visual metaphor for recollection and decline. Yet the heightened visual palette often clashes with the shallow emotional insights on offer. Where ‘Columbus‘ and ‘After Yang‘ thrived on restraint and ambiguity, here Kogonada embraces excess, crafting what sometimes feels closer to an inspirational Instagram feed than a cinematic exploration of grief and connection.
The cast adds undeniable star wattage. Robbie plays Sarah with her signature blend of vulnerability and steel, while Farrell’s sad charm gives David just enough weight to keep him from disappearing in the haze of whimsy. Supporting turns from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline, who are playing the eccentric rental car agents who hand over the enchanted Saturn, add comic bursts, although their antics veer toward broad sketch comedy rather than character-driven humor.
When Road Trip Clichés Replace Genuine Emotional Stakes
At its best, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey nods to Kaufmanesque storytelling, evoking films where memory, identity, and love intersect in magnificent landscapes. But unlike Eternal Sunshine, which balanced conceptual playfulness with real emotional stakes, Kogonada’s film rarely digs beneath surface-level pain. The traumas Sarah and David revisit feel generic, like most of us can relate to. A breakup, a parental death, a high school crush gone wrong. These aren’t insights so much as clichés, and they rarely accumulate into something profound.
Still, there are moments that land. A sequence where Farrell belts out a few bars from ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really’ Trying is unexpectedly funny and oddly touching. Another scene where Sarah bristles at being mistaken for “40” in David’s high school flashback captures the sting of vanity and time passing with refreshing sharpness. These glimpses of honesty make you wish the film had trusted its actors and themes more, and its devices less.
For all its flaws, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has a kind heart. Its ultimate message is that that we shouldn’t let old baggage weigh us down, and that healing often means opening doors we would rather leave shut, which is earnest and perhaps even useful. But the film insists on packaging that truth in glossy artifice, and trading in authentic struggle for neatly staged revelations.
Kogonada’s latest is less a bold new chapter in his career than a curious detour of a romantic fable, which is painted in primary colors. Where the journey is more spectacle than substance. Farrell and Robbie are magnetic enough to carry audiences along for the ride, but don’t expect the trip to linger the way the best road movies do. Sometimes, the most beautiful journeys are the ones that leave a little messy.
