A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a Big Bold Beautiful Mess by Henry Atticus Wilcox

There has never been anything quite like Hinge. A sleek-white butcher-house, recommending up an endless buffet of meat; a place where fresh flesh is pumped in, carved up, and discarded into the anonymity of an Instagram following: that graveyard of stillborn romances. All you need is a perfect post; one flawless mix of music and visuals that will, surely, certainly (just this once), resuscitate those staunch story watchers–like Lazarus, they will rise and hit up your DMs.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is this story of modern love. It is a deeply flawed film—it’s silly without being funny, the leads are terribly miscast, and there’s a Burger King advertisement in the middle. And yet I love it; it makes me cry.

The film follows Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as attractive last-shot-at-love strangers, whose AI-powered cars force them to take a road trip together. Along the way, they encounter various kinds of doors that transport them into crucial moments and places from their pasts. As this odyssey unfolds, they begin to better understand each other, and, in turn, themselves.

It is fair to say a BBBJ is a very sappy film. Not for a single minute does it drop into an ironic register. It doesn’t resist sincerity; it revels in it. For people of a certain age, this is a radical act: original even. To see a modern film, with a contemporary setting, famous people you know, and shot in the style of any current Hollywood blockbuster is surprisingly affecting.  Each line of dialogue sings with an unfamiliar earnestness and honesty. These are two characters who say what they mean and mean what they say.

Even the very unfunny ‘jokes’ feel heartfelt. Like when Robbie’s character flippantly proposes to Farell in their very first meeting, it isn’t just a cynical parody of the wedding setup they find themselves in, but instead an act of total vulnerability. It is a raw, tangible hunger for connection. She genuinely yearns, and we genuinely feel that yearning.

Being born into a culture of post-irony in which so many films are trying to deconstruct themselves, it is refreshing to see a film that proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. It doesn’t undercut their character or emotions or situations in search of a cutting joke or genre elevation (“it’s right behind me, isn’t it”). Instead, it lets the surreal simply exist, and the characters just accept the situation and deal with it as real people would: with caution and excitement. 

The director, Kogonada, is no stranger to sincerity, of course. His first film, Columbus, is a gorgeously staged character piece and meditation on architecture. It’s about reconnecting with your surroundings as a way of reconnecting with the people who share them: only with our eyes open can we begin to open our hearts.

It is memory, however, that Kogonada seems to be most interested in. After Yang, his sophomore feature, follows a man (Farell again) who, while attempting to fix a broken-down older-brother droid for his daughter, discovers it had stored memories, and—it follows—a rich interior life. Farell becomes obsessed with playing back the moments this droid recorded of his family, uncovering secrets along the way; in doing so, he brings himself closer to the deceased droid. Kogonada reflects our modern condition: we have never had more access to each other and less idea what it is like to be anyone else. Now, our lives are connected by carousels of dreams.

The Instagram dump has become a rite of passage — our own personal portrait galleries, curated by us, for our imagined peers. If After Yang was about remembering a person through the digital artifacts they left behind, BBBJ goes one step further: what if, in the great age of the internet, the way people build relationships is through discrete interactions with selected memories? We fall in love with the posts before we ever fall in love with the person. You lie in bed and scroll four years back through their Instagram; you learn about their dog, their friends, their admiration of an obscure indie-punk Beatles cover band. You arrive at the restaurant with a picture of their life and yet you know nothing at all, not really.

The doors in a BBBJ seem to offer us a path out of our chronic voyeurism. The doors allow you to step not into a photo but into a memory—it has everything that is outside the frame. The weather; the peeling wallpaper peering out under the fridge; the seven minutes before and the seven minutes after.

The modern world denies us continuity. We assemble people out of fragments and meet them in the flesh almost never. The doors give us something. So a device that borrows Instagram’s discretized look but lets you walk around in their shoes feels like an improvement, right? Like a meet-up with your favorite coffee influencer, it is the ‘meet-and-greet’, that in-person experience, that brings you closer.

It is not surprising to me that older critics universally despised this movie: they never had to split themselves in two. Ever since Plato was squawking about it, we have been asking whether we ever actually made it out of the cave; whether we are in the real world or the fake one. For those of us who conduct half a life in the screen-world and half a life in the physical one, the separation of selfhood means that we know what it is like to step between the boundary of real and other. To pass through the door in a BBBJ is to step into an Instagram-like world.

Interestingly, the door is not a ‘true’ memory; it is more of a homage to the event, and its relation to the subject. The characters wield ultimate control over these ‘memory–instances’–they have conversations with their parents that never took place, they confess to high school crushes, they sing and dance together. In one particularly special scene, Robbie’s character gets to be in the hospital after her mother died, even though it never really happened (she was banging her professor). The process of reliving is reclaiming, and reclaiming can involve a lot of recreation.

The door is a bit of a rose-tinted filter. We edit our Instagram photos for others, and memories for ourselves, but the result is still the same: an authorship of experience. Sontag wrote that a photo allows for “imaginary possession of a past that is unreal”. That to take one is a way of taking possession, of converting a piece of the world into something you own and can hold at a distance. A memory works the same way. It is an extension of the person remembering, a means of acquiring the thing that happened.

Memory is more intimate than reality; more fractured and more real. It is the point at which our experience of the world moves from being around us, to being inside us. The senses reduced, distilled into one complete entity, a single ‘memory-object’.

And yet, despite all this babble, it is obviously not enough to take the three highest and lowest moments of your life as if you were creating some sort of perverse tier-list. You are a living, breathing, farting and shitting mass of conscious cells looking for a reason to keep on going. You are alive. You are S-tier.

To love takes more than this film shows us, but it serves as a starting point for where we find ourselves today. If Hinge is truly ‘designed to be deleted,' then maybe we can make our digital tools into the bridge we need to cross before we leave the screen behind and start really living. I cried in the cinema. Then I went home and scrolled reels; we all have to start somewhere.