Sometimes the element of surprise can really take a movie over the finish line. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and there are a few central reasons why. And it’s to no fault of the filmmaker or cast. Director Kogonada has made two films prior to this that I’ve enjoyed very much – 2017’s Columbus and 2021’s After Yang. I love both leading actors here, Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell have given me no reason to doubt them. But the early buzz for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey was weak, bordering on negative. The spot in the release schedule where we find it – in mid September, post summer movie season, but pre awards season, did not inspire confidence. I was ready to skip this one altogether when a friend asked if I wanted to go the Saturday after it opened. I agreed to, and I love it when I find myself pleasantly surprised.

David (Farrell) is going to a wedding out of town. He finds a boot on his car and an ad nearby for a mysterious car rental service. He rents an old 1990s sedan and drives to his destination where he meets and flirts with Sarah (Robbie), who lives in the same city. Due to a series of circumstances, they end up driving back to the city together. The GPS has other plans for them, however. It sends them on the titular big, bold, beautiful journey where they find a series of doors that allow them to revisit pivotal moments of their lives, the moments that have shaped the people they’ve become. David and Sarah must confront past traumas as they begin to fall for each other.

The trailers for this movie really made it look like the kind of thing that wouldn’t work for me. This kind of sweet, saccharine movie that tries to answer the big questions about life often rings false for me. And maybe I was just in the right mood for this movie when I sat down for it yesterday, but I was surprisingly charmed by A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. It is all pretty dumb – the observations the film makes about human behavior, love and romance, family, and the moments in life that matter are all kind of surface level and basic. But Scott Weiss’ script gets the majority of this just right enough, that I was emotionally invested in the whole thing pretty much the whole way through. And also, we go long and far on the strengths of this cast.

Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell initially seem like a weird pairing, and the big conversations and flirtations they have early on in the film kind of set you up for something the movie doesn’t really do. It feels like the film is going to force the two together, and create a romance where there shouldn’t be one. And then the writing pulls back and allows these two characters to get to know each other on a more substantive level. And once Robbie and Farrell are in their element, they’re a delight to watch together. Their character’s journeys might not really dig deep – Robbie’s character thinks she’s broken because her mother passed away when she was young, and Farrell had a strained relationship with his emotionally distant father. But there’s just enough recognizable human truth here to sell this thing the way they need to.

I was also impressed with the murderer’s row of supporting players we have here. Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge play the eccentric workers at the car rental service, and they seem to be having fun. We also have the great Lily Rabe as Sarah’s mother and I could watch a whole movie of those two actresses playing off each other. We have the always-great Billy Magnussen in one scene as Sarah’s ex boyfriend, and Sarah Gadon as David’s ex and Hamish Linklater as his father. We also have brief appearances by Brandon Perea, from Jordan Peele’s Nope, and Chloe East, most recently seen in A24’s Heretic last year. And I didn’t realize it until afterward, but we have Jodie Turner-Smith as the calming voice of the seemingly magical GPS. I love in a movie where I’m constantly noticing supporting actors who I know from other projects. And maybe that’s one of the reasons this film worked for me.

Another reason I was so drawn into this world is because the film is flooded with style. Kogonada is clearly drawing inspiration from the films of Jacques Demy – lots of primary colors and whimsy in the imagery, as well as classic romance films of the 1940s and ‘50s. Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, who also shot Kogonada’s After Yang, makes every frame look like a postcard. The legendary Joe Hisaishi, known for the scores of many Hayao Miyazaki films, composes our score here, and that very well could have been an important contributing factor as to why the vibe of this film hit me the way it did. 

And I appreciated the way Scott Weiss’ script chooses to not spell everything out to the viewer, regarding how and why all of this is happening to these characters. My rule for this kind of thing is either explain everything or explain nothing, because if it’s somewhere in the middle, I’m going to have more questions. And the fact that we don’t really know why this is happening to these characters or why they’ve been placed together like this, is actually a point in the movie’s favor. There’s a gentle undercurrent of mystery here, and I was sufficiently swept up in the whole thing.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey may or may not earn its title, depending on your vantage point, but this whole thing simply worked for me. Maybe it hit me in the right frame of mind, and maybe if I was in a more cynical mood when I saw it yesterday, my reaction would have been different. It’s either going to strike you as beautiful and meaningful, or you’ll be annoyed by the heart-on-its-sleeve earnestness of the whole experience. But in my opinion, that cheesiness is more a feature than a bug, and the whimsical wistfulness of it all struck me as undeniably charming. And when you have two megawatt movie stars like Robbie and Farrell at the center, I’m easy to please.