Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY
It's been nearly a dozen years since Margot Robbie had her professional breakthrough in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, and more than two dozen since Colin Farrell had his in Joel Schumacher's 2000 war drama Tigerland. While both performers, of course, are beautiful and innately appealing, they also seem to become better actors with each passing year: frequently riskier in terms of choices; more confident and relaxed; more willing to give themselves over to roles. I generally love spending two hours in their company. Or, in the case of Farrell's fearsome turn in The Penguin, eight hours.
That's kind of why, with Robbie and Farrell headlining, director Kogonada's and screenwriter Seth Reiss' romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is even more of a godawful embarrassment than it otherwise may have been. The film no doubt wouldn't have worked no matter who played its leads. Yet watching Robbie and Farrell actively try to make something decent and heartfelt out of this noxious treacle was maddening, given that the material and its presentation were so clearly, incessantly beneath them. It felt like something that Farrell might've signed on to when he was still in his mid-aughts wilderness, and something Robbie might've done immediately after 2013 to cement her rising stardom – and what's worse, both performers appear to know it. Though the romantic chemistry shared here is questionable at best, you can see how strenuously they're working to make their banter seem frisky and delightful, and to give their vaguely written characters some sense of interior life. But it's performative intelligence and emotionalism in a void. Kogonada's and Reiss' self-help session in the guise of cinema gives you no reason to believe in it, and despite their geniality, we consequently can't believe in Robbie and Farrell, either.
Farrell plays a single man named David. I'd tell you what he does for a living and where he's from, but the movie doesn't bother telling us. (Both his and Robbie's characters only mention living “in the city.”) David is heading to the wedding, some 250 miles away, of someone he has an equally unmentioned connection to. But after ending a phone conversation with his mom, who's concerned that her son is attending stag – I'm sorry, but maybe Mom should consider backing off considering Colin Farrell is 49? – he finds a boot on his car. Luckily for David, however, a hand-posted sign for a car-rental service is visible not 10 feet away. Rather than call Enterprise or Hertz, David takes a chance on this unnamed company, and walks to their cavernous showroom boasting all of two cars, as well as two unnamed employees. (Kevin Kline, not looking or sounding terribly well, plays “The Mechanic,” and a German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge – unleashing enough cheerful F-bombs to justify the film's R rating – plays “The Cashier.” She made me giggle. His presence made me sad.) These weirdos set David up with a discontinued Saturn and the optional but highly recommended GPS, and off he goes to the wedding … where, naturally, he meets Robbie's Sarah, who also has no job or hometown to speak of.
The pair hit it off, sorta, with David smoothly underplaying his Irish charm, and Sarah – Robbie reliably hiding her Australian accent behind a regionally unspecific American dialect – flirtatiously warding him off with her version of the “I'm a loner, Dottie” speech from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. But the next morning, on his way back home, David's GPS (voiced by Jodie Smith-Turner) seems to become cognizant, asking the man if he'd like to go on, yes, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Just a wee bit confused – though I'd argue that major confusion, as well as an exorcist, may have been in order – David says yes, and the GPS guides his Saturn … to Burger King. Also there, wouldn't you know it, is Sarah, who seats herself at David's table as they espouse on the product-placement joys of onion rings and the Whopper with cheese, and Sarah yet again states that she's Trouble with a capital T. She also, apparently, has equally moronic trust in off-market rental companies, having secured her vehicle from the same outfit as David's. They go to the parking lot. They bid adieu. And wouldn't you know it (#2), Sarah's car won't start, and she needs David to give her a lift. Would they, the British GPS asks, like to go on a Big Bold Beautiful Journey together?
If you've seen the trailers, you know what happens next: David and Sarah take a magical mystery tour through a bunch of enchanted doorways in rural locales, all of them leading to significant places from our protagonists' pasts: childhood homes; favorite venues as adults; the same hospital where Sarah's mom died and David himself almost died. Watching the previews, it was all I could do to not gag at the forced preciousness of it all, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the full-length results are worse than I imagined. Yet I was surprised, because never in a million years would I have guessed that David and Sarah, from the start, would take all these quasi-supernatural events for granted. After walking through their fourth or fifth miraculous wormhole, the duo seemed almost bored. They weren't alone.
When you watch other films set in familiar versions of Earth that boast similarly outré premises, among them the sublime Charlie Kaufmann comedies Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you're traditionally given a few scenes that ground you before the rug gets pulled, the characters' fundamental realness accentuating the strangeness of what's to come. With that notice for the bogus car-rental place, ABBBJ pulls the rug in its first scene, so you never feel you're in a real world to begin with. For whatever reason, David and Sarah also adapt awfully quickly to the weirdness. A few seconds' worth of Farrell's exquisitely furrowed eyebrows are all we get before he's blindly following GPS instruction, and the first time he and Sarah see a randomly positioned red doorway in the middle of a field, there isn't a moment of hesitation on either of their parts before they traipse on in. While in David's first literalized flashback, neither character delivers more than a “Wow!” before fully accepting the belief-defying lunacy of their adventure. And when they get back in the car following the first of many reunions with the past and evidence of personality deficiencies based on trauma, all they can talk about is the door itself. “Who put it there?” asks an incredulous Sarah. I'm sorry … . “Who put it there?” That's what you're wondering? Not “What the f--- is happening right now?!?”
Sarah's and David's unfathomable mutual chill is one thing. Screenwriter Reiss' shameless Psych 101 psychoanalyzing is something else, because wouldn't you know it (#3), all of our leads' problems can be directly attributed to their parents. Sarah's mom (Lily Rabe), who eventually succumbed to cancer, endured a string of dead-end relationships, including the one with Sarah's father, so Sarah is now unable to emotionally commit to relationships and cheats every chance she gets. David's parents (Jennifer Grant and Hamish Linklater – the latter of whom is real-life-married to Lily Rabe) apparently spent too much time convincing their child that he was special, to the point that he now believes no woman is good enough for him. But to quote Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors: “Tough titty.”
Directing the flashback visits for as much self-pity as they can stand (and a good deal more), Kogonada spends nearly two hours asking us to ache for great-looking ciphers whose relationship issues would likely be healed with only a few weeks of therapy. And sometimes the trips through those fantastical doors are downright cruel, as they are when David, back in high school performing the lead in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, grossly humiliates his female co-star by pledging his real-life adoration in front of a bewildered audience. Ambushed and angry, the girl rushes off-stage in tears, and two thoughts came to me. One: If this was a replication of something that David actually did, he was a complete asshole, and a mortifying teen thespian, to boot. Two: If this was merely David's fantasy re-creation of a moment that never actually transpired, we're now being forced to watch a 15-year-old kid being publicly humiliated by a 49-year-old man professing his love for her. Either way, David loses all sympathy … though it's nice to know that, like Ryan Gosling, Colin Farrell can carry a tune and even dance a little, sometimes without looking at his feet.
Because everything here beggars belief, I didn't necessarily mind that the “rules” behind the alternate universes or whatever changed with every new door. Sometimes Sarah and/or David are witness to events they couldn't have seen in real life. Sometimes they occupy the same physical space but with partners who don't recognize the others' presence, as happens in a coffee-shop meetup that finds David breaking up with his ex (Sarah Gadon) and Sarah preemptively breaking up with hers (a depressingly ill-cast Billy Magnussen). At one point, David enters a doorway and is no longer David – he's his own father, giving his youthful self a piece of now-hard-won advice. Most often, though, our leads revert to younger versions of themselves, and this conceit is finally performed rather gorgeously in an encounter between Sarah and her cancer-stricken mom, who curl up on the couch together to watch Tom Hanks in Big. For just a few minutes, as Robbie and Rabe connect with instinctive familial humor and warmth and love, you sense how affecting this film might've been with a script that saw its programmed character types as honest-to-God people.
That's not what the majority of Reiss' screenplay provides, however, and for the brief time we're treated to it, the sublime rapport between Robbie and Rabe had the unintentional effect of filling me with deeper hatred for all the manufactured, expository bullshit that came before, plus a few minutes after. Unless they're extolling the merits of Burger King, Sarah and David can't have one conversation that doesn't pin the tail on the figurative donkey of their self-imposed (but it's their parents' fault!) heartache, and that leads to Robbie and Farrell spending the film's run time spinning their wheels, offering surface charisma in lieu of truth. Their dedication to duty is to be admired, I guess. But with the silent message between its stars reading unmistakably as “Let's do our best under trying circumstances,” A Big Bold Beautiful Journey isn't big, and isn't bold, and isn't beautiful. It is, however, a journey. A slog, after all, is its own type of journey.
HIM
Much as I'd love to report that director/co-writer Justin Tipping's Him is a sequel to, or perhaps a multiverse-version of, Spike Jonze's Oscar-winning Her, it's actually something even more unanticipated: a sports-horror movie. Sports horror – now there's something that feels like it could become a thing. Sure, an entire high-school football team got massacred in 2023's Bottoms, and as I recall, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan was pretty terrifying. But I love imagining where this potential sub-genre might lead. A baseball flick in which one of the base umpires is shooting players with poison darts – but no one knows which ump! A basketball flick in which slow-acting poison is dropped into players' Gatorade! A golf flick in which strategically placed balls are filled with explosives!
All of these ridiculous notions, I'd argue, are more fun to consider than what ultimately transpires in Him, which features all the makings for a fantastic, unsettling, thematically rich entertainment, and continually undermines them through pushiness, vagueness, and so many hyper-edited montages that I sighed with relief every time a shot lasted longer than five seconds. (I didn't wind up sighing much.) Tyriq Withers plays Cameron Cade, a collegiate athlete who's on his way to becoming the next NFL sensation when a deranged attacker in a mascot uniform derails his plans with a sharp blow to the head. Not long after, Cameron's pro prospects are looking iffy until he gets the call to spend a week training at the Texas compound of his quarterback hero Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), whose legendary, eight-time-MVP tenure with the fictional San Antonio Saviors might be ending. What follows are six days of, in order of appearance, joy, dedication, hesitation, confusion, disbelief, and outright terror as Cameron realizes the training camp – dun dun du-u-u-u-un – might not be the hallowed conduit for sporting excellence he imagined.
I know they've been around for a long time. But does it seem that we've been getting an unusually hefty amount of these sorts of thrillers in recent years – ones in which our protagonist (and maybe one of their best friends or dates) winds up in a secluded environment with creepy-as-hell individuals who all seem to know the deal and ain't talkin'? I'm thinking specifically of The Menu, and Blink Twice, and this past spring's Opus … . Movies in which every single example of blind obsequiousness or side-eye from staffers signals sinister intent, with our heroes constantly being gaslit until it's eventually revealed that their paranoia was right on the money? I'm not complaining, mind you. Even when the movies themselves don't work, there's enjoyment in their unsettling rides. And Withers, here, is easily as charismatic and empathetic as those aforementioned titles' Anya Taylor-Joy, Naomi Ackie, and Ayo Edeberi. A beautiful camera subject who's also an emotionally expressive actor, Withers carries Him on his broad shoulders, never letting us forget the face of childlike wonder and obligation that Austin Pulliam, as the grade-school Cam, secures in the prelude scenes. You're with Cameron and his tortured plight every step of the way. I wish the film itself was.
Although the difference is frequently hard to explain, both reviewers and general audiences know there's a distinct contrast between movies that are showy and movies that are showing off, and Tipping's feature (co-written by Skip Bronkie and Zack Ayers) lands way too often in the latter category. I was very much with the film during its prelude, which felt like an extended version of certain flashbacks in Us, and continued to enjoy it up until Cameron's assault by that mascot “fan,” which had echoes of LaKeith Stanfield's abduction in Get Out. (Yes, Jordan Peele is a producer on the movie, and it was shepherded by his Monkeypaw Productions company.) But everything slowly yet irrevocably fell apart after Cameron reached the compound, and Wayans essentially took over as a co-lead. Wayans is as magnetic as ever. At no point, however, is he believable as the potentially psychopathic guru Him requires the actor to be. Isaiah's screaming isn't frightening, his veiled threats aren't particularly disturbing, and oddly, he isn't even very funny. Wayans' vacillations between cheery bonhomie and threat not only aren't convincing; they aren't dramatically sound. I felt as though the actor put a lot of thought into specific line readings without considering how nonsensical they would sound in tandem. It's not a showy performance so much as a show-offy one, and without a scene partner giving his role equal emotional weight (or even emotional coherence), Withers is left hanging.
This wouldn't be so detrimental if Withers had other actors to spar with. But barring Wayans, Jim Jeffries as the resident Dr. Feelgood, and an uncharacteristically unbearable Tim Heidecker as Cameron's manager, the only scene partner Withers gets is Julia Fox as Isaiah's influencer wife Elsie, and she wears out her welcome long before we get to Him's final scene of gory retribution that makes the climax of Bottoms (a satirical comedy, mind you!) look like the ultimate in cinema verité. Otherwise, Tipping's bloody, joyless offering is one hyperactive perils-of-football-worship montage after another, and astute and timely subject matter – whether players, for whatever reason, should choose to demolish their brains for glory – is forgotten in pursuit of thrills that never emerge. By all means, Hollywood, bring on more sports horror. Just do your best not to fumble it.
THE SENIOR
If you're in the mood for a movie about Texas football but would rather it came without quite so many scenes of gory viscera, hints of the occult, and consistently foul language, you're welcome to avoid Him and instead buy a ticket to director Rob Lurie's The Senior. Or, this being an Angel Studios release, you can simply pray that a friend will scan the obligatory QR code during the end credits and “pay forward” a ticket on your behalf.
Based on a true story, because we wouldn't come close to believing this thing if it weren't, Lurie's 2007-set inspirational sports drama casts Michael Chiklis as Mike Flynt, who, at 59, is still mourning the year he got kicked out of school and off the Sul Ross State University Lobos. To be clear, Mike doesn't seem to mind not getting his degree. He deeply minds that he wasn't able to play football anymore, and in the manner of any number of barflies who can't stop talking about That Loss to State that ruined their lives all those years ago, Mike can't stop imagining what mighta been. Cue the 35th team reunion, and a pal's drunken mention that, as Mike technically never advanced beyond senior year, he could conceivably finish his Sul Ross credits and re-join the team. From then on, if we didn't before, we know precisely where this is all heading, and would even if the Lobos' head coach (Rob Corddry) didn't witness the overweight, panting, sweating Mike Flynt steadfastly refusing to quit during team tryouts. As the coach succinctly puts it, “He's like a 59-year-old Rudy.” Indeed. Is anyone taking notes so we can get that on a poster?
Here's the thing. I don't know anyone who wants a reinvented wheel for the inspirational sports flick. I sure don't. I generally love the earnestness, and the triumphant scores with heavy brass, and the rousing locker-room speeches, and especially the endearing stock figures who are only around to fulfill one dramatic purpose apiece. A half-hour into The Senior, as silly and frankly embarrassing as much of it was, Mike's Lobos compadres, including the token ageist jerk, were so uniformly winning that I was convinced I was gonna cry by the end. Maybe because of the behemoth sweetheart who never stopped calling Mike “sir”; maybe because of Mike's collegiate bestie who hoped to set a new state record. Yet my eyes throughout remained as dry as the Sahara, given that few movies of this type have ever seemed quite so blatantly, and agonizingly, weaponized for cheap emotion.
Let's start with the faith-based angle, because as an Angel Studios release, it was gonna have one. We do learn a lot about Mike and his upbringing: his childhood at the hands of an abusive father; his consequent anger issues; his additionally consequent withholding of love for, and bullying of, his now-adult son Micah. (Resembling a mid-20s Robert Sean Leonard, the subtly anguished Brandon Flynn gives the film's most persuasive performance.) Felled by injuries some time into his Lobos tenure, Mike is a mess. Until he picks up a bible – one that he didn't know belonged to his late father – in a stack of old stuff in his mom's garage. Mom explains that Pop found religion late in life, after he and Mike had stopped speaking. And honest to God, the mere act of touching that bible appears to stir something in Mike. He fights past his injuries, treats his teammates with more respect, accepts his failings – he even keeps the tome nearby when he trains. Trouble is, there's nothing to suggest that Mike reads that bible. Any of it. Except maybe the inscription on an otherwise blank page: “Lord, give me the strength to forgive others. And myself.” And I'm pretty sure it wasn't Jesus who inscribed that. The Senior screenwriter Robert Eisele seems to be implying that even proximity to the Good Book is Good Enough, and for a faith-based entertainment, that seems, if not heretical, at least criminally lazy.
But after you realize the pro-faith angle is merely a bone being thrown at the Angel Studios devout to secure their attendance, and that the film is less interested in Mike's spiritual conversion than his self-centered need to recreate youthful glory days, everything here comes off as hollow, as well as rather grossly manipulative. (And this is a genre that thrives on manipulation.) I enjoyed our time with Mary Stuart Masterson, who gives a lovely, heartfelt performance as Mike's wife, despite her having to iterate down-to-earth bona fides by saying “I'm a West Texas gal” twice. And the initially unrecognizable Corddry is terrific in a rare dramatic role; considering his eyeglasses, accent, and squint, I initially thought this was a rare acting role for James Carville. As for the overeager Chiklis, he never stops acting, but it was adorable sensing his unmistakable delight at being a headlining movie star for maybe the first time since he played John Belushi in 1989's horribly misbegotten bio-pic Wired. But the indifferently shot, increasingly unsuccessful deck-stacking of The Senior infuriated me, and I had no choice but to roll my eyes when, at the end of this True Story's clearly fictionalized Last Game, the announcer's voice overpowered the cheering fans: “You can't write it better that this!!!” Ohhhhh … I think you can.
THE HISTORY OF SOUND
In the 1910 prelude for director Oliver Hermanus' The History of Sound – now playing at Iowa City's FilmScene – we're introduced to Lionel Worthing, a Kentucky boy of about 11, as he wanders the backwoods of Kentucky, the voice-over narration coming from the character's much-older self. (Leo Cocovinis plays the boy, Chris Cooper provides the narration, and Paul Mescal is Lionel from ages 18 through 28.) During this idyll, the aged Lionel tells us that, as a youth, he was blessed with the remarkable ability to see sound: to know what color a D-minor was; to picture the harmonic vibrations in a perfect musical blend. That's a fascinating, arresting setup for a movie whose fundamental theme is music, and I was eager to see Lionel's gifts rendered on-screen. Yet while Hermanus' film boasts significant pleasures, I'm sad to report that its biggest disappointment, at least in retrospect, is this prelude, because at no point going forward are Lionel's seeing-sound talents ever visualized, or even referenced. It would be easy to let screenwriter Ben Shattuck off the hook for this, as he was adapting a short story, and the author's opening meditations perhaps didn't fit with Sharruck's planned narrative. But Sharruck also wrote the short story. So now I don't know what to think, except that this was a seriously missed opportunity.
If you're a fellow fan of Brokeback Mountain, you might find the phrase “missed opportunity” running in your head throughout The History of Sound. See if any of this sounds familiar. Lionel, now played by Mescal, meets a kindred spirit – in this case, a fellow musicologist – while in a remote location. (Here, it's the New England Conservatory circa 1917, rather than a 1963 sheep ranch in Wyoming.) Lionel and this handsome brunette, Josh O'Connor's David White, bond over shared interests and love of a good drink. Despite the societal shunning that could ensure, they have sex, and enjoy, in secret, a passionate relationship Circumstances dictate that the pair are separated for years. (David is drafted into World War I service.) They reunite a few years later, euphoric in their shared company, and spend much of their time sharing a pup tent. They part again. Time passes. Tragedy strikes. Lionel's life is never the same. Given all this, and our familiarity with the 2005 Ang Lee romantic masterpiece, one should expect at least a few cathartic sobs at Hermanus' film, yes?
No. But not “no” because the movie fails. “No” because outpourings of emotion are not at all what this picture appears designed to elicit. Days after seeing it, though, my most confounding issue with The History of Sound is that I'm still not certain what I was meant to take from it. The post-war trek that reunites Lionel and David finds them traveling the northeast in order to capture wax-cylinder recordings of native folk songs, and these scenes are frequently extraordinary. That's partly due to the songs themselves and the people who sing them – the effect of their performance is like O Brother, Where Art Thou? with less self-awareness and no comic irony. But there's also something intensely noble and selfless about the recording process, and in what is easily his finest moment in the film, Mescal's Lionel appears lit from within when explaining to some rural children the way that sound can feel, which he demonstrates while having them place their hands on their throats as they hum. It's the closest Hermanus' movie comes to fulfilling the promise of its prelude.
Mescal and O'Connor also prove to be magical screen partners, and you easily see the trust they have in one another as actors and how eager they are to play their characters' flirtation and deep love. It's the film itself, however, that keeps their combined heat at a temperature so minimal that it likely wouldn't boil an egg. Their passion does occasionally seep through: during an impromptu kiss in a border-house hallway; lying in bed during a playful reverie. Otherwise, this is a very stuff-upper-lip, very British (despite the characters being American) rendition of heated adoration. It's weirdly toothless, because unlike with Brokeback's Ennis and Jack, there's never any direct threat involved in Lionel's and David's relationship. Societal disapproval of homosexuality is restricted solely to presumptions based on the early-20th-century time frame – no one confronts our leads about their relationship while they're together – and Lionel himself admits that he would have no problem if people found out about his relationship with David. The stakes feel weirdly low for most of The History of Sound, which makes the movie, for all of its surface pleasures, rather boring. And by the time you find out what the true stakes were, Hermanus' staid, conventional filmmaking has dulled most of your interest in them. I reached the point at which I was meant to cry, but was honestly too tired to summon the effort.
So yeah: This isn't the next great, epically scaled, big-screen gay romance. But for those of us who are still pining for one nearly two decades after Brokeback Mountain, there's still enough here to satisfy. Mescal is decent enough, although his sweet tenor doesn't suggest genius-level boyhood talent, let alone the talent required to get Lionel a primo singing gig in Rome. Between this film and Gladiator II, Mescal is starting to look less assured in leading roles than I would've anticipated after the triumphs of Normal People and Aftersun,. (Fingers crossed for Hamnet.) O'Connor is excellent, his portrayal growing in emotional complexity and empathy after the film turns its attentions away from David; he may singlehandedly be the reason to watch the film more than once. And beyond its leads, The History of Sound gives us beautifully lived-in period detail, a bunch of folk tunes with stirring narratives you'll want to commit to memory, and the glorious sight of Cooper demonstrating the virtue of a life well-lived, if regretfully remembered. It's hard to imagine Mescal, from now on, not placing Lionel near the top of his all-time-favorite roles. It's the one that led to him being Chris Cooper.
