First impressions of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

It’s really tough to enchant an audience of adult moviegoers with a whimsical fantasy. Arthouse directors who can take their time casting subtle spells occasionally work wonders: think Wings of Desire, Being John Malkovich, or Amelie. When big studios give popular directors and big stars the resources for something like this, we’re occasionally surprised by bold creativity and engaging storytelling — think The Truman Show, Barbie, Stranger Than Fiction, or Midnight in Paris. When it works, it’s usually because everyone is invested in suspending our disbelief, more committed to bringing the characters and the context to life than they are eager to teach some pre-determined lesson.

But we have no shortage of films in which the whimsy turns out to be flimsy. Too many collapse under the weight of sermonizing and sentimentality. We come to the movies for magic (as Nicole Kidman so frequently reminds us in AMC theaters), not for moralizing. I can’t help but think of The Life of Chuck, which is, for me, an example of good intentions that spends too much energy trying to mean something that is already obvious, and not enough energy creating a coherent, compelling vision. Similarly earnest, Nine Days worked so hard to preach inspiration that I think it tore its ACL. Both of these remind me of how hard Big Fish worked to move me, but instead it left me skeptical of what it actually wanted to say. Some of my students are big fans of Ben Stiller’s adaptation of The Secret Life of Water Mitty, and I might have enjoyed that when I was a teenager, but the familiarity and simplicity of its carpe diem lesson didn’t do much for me. Nor did About Time, a fantasy rom-com in which the protagonist learned lessons in fantastical ways while committing an astonishing number of ethical crimes. And I still have PTSD flashbacks to the misguided emotionalism and imaginative histrionics of What Dreams May Come.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a strange anomaly. Its premise sounds like something I’d enjoy — maybe even something I’d write! I was going to describe it as “The Phantom Tollbooth for grownups,” but Justin Chang, at NPR, got there first, saying that the movie is “about love, loss and the fear of commitment, with a let's-go-on-an-adventure twist, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by way of The Phantom Tollbooth.” Unfortunately, the movie plays in that mode of shameless moralizing and motivational speaking that makes me want to flee the theater. It is, at times, almost unbearably silly, saccharine, and sentimental. And it’s a million miles from being an achievement as beautifully composed and as deeply moving as The Truman Show (one of my favorite films of all time).

But I did not flee the theater. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey counters heavy-handed screenwriting with just enough visual creativity and movie-star charm that I found myself enjoying the movie anyway. I never felt what the trailer had led me to expect: the urge to walk out.