“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” Is None of Those Things

If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the genre are hard to stick, because fantasy, by definition, isn’t rooted in experience. No one has lived on a distant planet, in the far future, or any place where dragons or wizards rule—so, kudos to anyone who can make such realms feel truly lived in. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” directed by Kogonada and written by Seth Reiss, offers a framework of fantasy that’s daringly extreme yet closely connected to ordinary realities. The story involves everyday people who need supernatural assistance to consider and appreciate their own lives. In this regard, it’s related, if distantly, to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” even if, in keeping with modern times, the angel who intervenes isn’t a kindly old gent but an interactive digital device.

Colin Farrell plays David Langley, a single man living in an unnamed city who’s about to drive to a wedding but finds his car ticketed and booted. Lo and behold, he notices a sign conveniently affixed to a wall, advertising “The Car Rental Agency,” as if it were the city’s only one. The agency is housed in a vast, nearly empty building, where a pair of eccentric employees—a cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and a mechanic (Kevin Kline)—have only one kind of car to rent, a 1994 Saturn. They push David to get the supplementary G.P.S., and it turns out that they’re contriving more than just an extra sale. The G.P.S. voice (Jodie Turner-Smith), interactive and seemingly sentient, guides David into the adventure of the title, and he shares this adventure with Sarah Myers (Margot Robbie), a woman whom he meets at the wedding and who’s driving a Saturn from the same agency.

Their connection at the wedding seals their destiny, even though it’s thwarted in the short term by a set of hurdles: David has been disappointed by too many women; Sarah has broken too many men’s hearts. (She even self-shames as a serial cheater.) Their G.P.S.-guided journey is transparently devised to overcome their resistance to each other—by way of reconciling them to themselves. The G.P.S. voice directs both Sarah and David through a variety of landscapes containing magical doors that they must open and pass through, disappearing as they cross the thresholds and emerging in places and situations from earlier in their lives.

These episodes, mostly from their youth and mostly traumatic, are the source of Sarah’s and David’s negative views of romance, and of themselves. The most elaborate of them brings David back to the age of fifteen, when he was a theatre kid doing a star turn singing and dancing in a high-school production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” A girl in the cast rebuffed his declaration of love, throwing him for an enduring romantic loop. The most melodramatic return to the past finds Sarah, at the age of nineteen, arriving at a hospital an hour after her long-ailing mother has died—and blaming herself because it was a tryst that made her late. When David and Sarah go back to these early experiences, the actors’ appearances are unchanged, but other characters interact with them as if they are younger versions of themselves. There are tricks, though: David meets his father (Hamish Linklater) shortly after his own birth and meets his own teen-age self (Yuvi Hecht); Sarah and David attend the same wedding twice under different sets of circumstances.

Incarnating these flashbacks as parallel worlds brings a winning audacity to “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” But the effect is undone by the lack of specificity with which the characters are presented, both in their current existence and in their backstories. They are ciphers, offering Farrell and Robbie none of the burrs and thorns of personality to bring texture, none of the interests and activities that flesh out a character. Nietzsche wrote that “a profession is the backbone of life,” but, if the lead characters of “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” have jobs, they are not specified. Backboneless, they slip through the film as inchoate blobs of emotion, which the script’s psychobabble does little to shape. In rendering David and Sarah archetypal, the film makes them abstract and thus inconsequential. Farrell and Robbie soldier on gamely—as do several other fine actors, including Linklater, as David’s father, and Lily Rabe, as Sarah’s mother—trying to infuse the characters with heart and soul. The characters’ faults, however, lie not in their stars but in themselves.

Kogonada’s highly distinctive film career took off in 2012, with a series of critically incisive video essays on such subjects as Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Anderson, neorealism, and Yasujirō Ozu, which rapidly established him as a key figure in cinephile circles. (Kogonada, who is Korean American, adapted his pseudonym from the name of the Japanese screenwriter and longtime Ozu collaborator Kogo Noda.) Next, he wrote and directed the dramatic feature “Columbus” (2017), which is among the most notable films of the past decade—not only an engaging drama but also a work of insightful criticism and of documentary contemplation. Set in Columbus, Indiana, a city known for its unusual concentration of distinguished modern architecture, it’s centered on Casey, a teen-age girl with a difficult family background whose aesthetic passion has been awakened by the city’s masterworks. Kogonada anchored this intellectual coming-of-age story in keenly perceptive images of the city’s buildings, as if seen through Casey’s mind’s eye, lending detailed and specific material reality to Casey’s inner life.

When I saw Kogonada’s next feature, “After Yang,” from 2021, I worried. It’s a futuristic story involving a humanoid robot who lives with (and surveils) a human family, but who also harbors a humanlike sensibility, which reveals itself in an affinity for photography. Like “Columbus,” “After Yang” was dramatically and emotionally rooted in a sense of beauty; the visually obsessed robot is something of a relative to Casey. But, whereas Kogonada’s observations in “Columbus” teemed with the textures of great architecture and of the city life it inspires, “After Yang” took place in a drastically abstracted world, which, for all the film’s thoughtful and suave production design, felt bare and synthetic. The characters in the film, too, lacked the complexities and surprises of ordinary life, just as the dystopia in which it’s set remains largely theoretical. If Kogonada wanted to evoke the inner impoverishment of an artificial-intelligence future, he succeeded, but it wasn’t clear whether this was intentional or a by-product of the thinness with which this society was imagined and evoked.