One week before the release of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s $175 million gamble financed by Warner Brothers, two new movies have been dumped by their distributors. There’s HIM, a Satanic CTE horror movie produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and released by Universal; and Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, produced and distributed by Sony. HIM was made for $27 million, high for contemporary horror, but even after a disastrous opening weekend and reams of bad reviews, it’s already made half its budget back. Star Marlon Wayans went on Instagram to defend the film and compared it to his previous films, all of which got trashed upon release. This includes Scary Movie, White Chicks, and Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Will HIM become a cult favorite, an adolescent rite of passage like those comedies? No. It’s a mess, but enjoyable enough and only 96 minutes.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a horse of a different color. Starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as a magically fated couple, the film’s thoroughly strange and tonally lopsided, typical for a director working in an unfamiliar language, but this isn’t Kogonada or screenwriter Seth Reiss’ first film in English. Set in a world characterized by sci-fi tech and ecstatic magical realism (recalling Her and Synecdoche, New York), A Big Bold Beautiful Journey begins with Farrell going to rent a car. As if in a dream, he enters the “CAR RENTAL AGENCY,” what looks like an airplane hangar empty of everything except Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and the bare essentials to run this kind of fairy godmother business. Farrell rents a car after agreeing to some weird stipulations: “Take this GPS in case your phone craps out on you,” and it’s this GPS that guides him through his life, old and new.
I like schmaltz; the only thing keeping me from seeing The Life of Chuck was the presence of Mark Hamill. Kogonada’s a fine composer of images, and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb does make it look magical, but it’s just as much of a mess as you may have heard, if you’ve heard of this movie at all. Months ago, stills were passed around of Farrell and Robbie, implicitly promising a big new beautiful motion picture, and plenty of people will find this movie beautiful, I’m sure of it, but on the whole it’s a remarkable failure. Because of the accomplished cinematography and smooth surf of Kogonada’s images, best without words.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey reminded me most of Here, the Robert Zemeckis masterpiece released on Halloween last year. Half a dozen generations seen from a single camera angle over 100 minutes, it’s bar none the most innovative and narratively advanced American film of the decade so far. Here is in the same emotional register as a Hallmark commercial, but because of the locked-down camera, you immediately feel as if you’re moving in time with these people, and the effect is immense. Kogonada’s film has nothing new: rather than reinvigorate and renew clichés a la Zemeckis and James L. Brooks, he shoots his movie like a Burger King commercial. It looks nice, and that “fast food hamburger” (the script really sounds like someone unfamiliar with English) certainly does look tasty. Burger King is thanked in the end credits, and yet the name isn’t mentioned and the logo isn’t seen.
“Whopper with Cheese” may be said, but this comes and goes. Shouldn’t the illustrious Burger Lords get their money’s worth? Perhaps “THE PRODUCER THANKS BURGER KING IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM” in tiny print in the end credits crawl is payment enough. Somehow I doubt it: Sony and whoever else pitched in on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey must’ve been hoping for some more pop epiphany-core, two movie stars in an easy way out after the surprise success of magical realist sci-fi Everything Everywhere All At Once. Without that film, there’s no Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Perhaps the appetite for hyper-cautious hyper-kinetic hyper-optimism has dried up in our Year of Fallen Stars and sociopolitical turmoil.
Horror’s where the audience is heading. There were around 30 people in the Senator’s second auditorium to see HIM, a movie that “bombed;” I was the only person in the Senator’s massive main room aside from one other elderly couple. They looked like they had a good time. So did I. If you can’t look away from bewildering failures and glowing turkeys—Collateral Beauty, Life Itself, Soul Man—then you must see A Big Bold Beautiful Journey as soon as possible, before those empty auditoriums fill up just a bit more (a bit bit more?) for One Battle After Another on Friday.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith