A Big Bold Beautiful Journey - a theatrical experience, brilliantly written

The undeniable appeal of Australian Margot Robbie and Irishman Colin Farrell is partly because they’re charming and beautiful, and partly because being a great big star doesn’t seem to be their driving ambition.

For every blockbuster they grace, they seem just as keen – particularly Farrell – to take wide, swinging punts at something odd, even arty.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey seems to walk the line between art and commerce. It’s a sort of magic-realism fable involving time travel and mystical doors. But it’s also a supremely human tale of what it’s like falling in love, despite yourself.

I’m not sure how universal its appeal is. I know it unerringly won me over.

David and Sarah meet at someone’s wedding. They’re both unaccountably single, intrigued by each other, but deeply suspicious of that feeling.

Just as Groucho Marx wouldn’t want to join a club that had him as a member, Sarah in particular would much prefer to hook up with someone easily discarded the next day.

And David is strangely relieved that Sarah isn’t bowled over by his charms.

So no hookup, except they keep running into each other on the drive back to the city. So, before parting forever, they stop off for a burger and, it has to be said, a bit of light flirting.

But on the way home, David’s rental car’s GPS takes a hand. Having been installed in rather mysterious circumstances, it now makes David an offer he can’t refuse.

Now a big, bold, beautiful journey may not be for everyone. But it certainly suits a bruised, failed romantic like David.

And the first stop of the journey is being a good Samaritan for Sarah, who’s own rental car unaccountably refuses to go.

So off they go together. And, while it may not be hooking up, or even just flirting, it turns out David and Sarah make very easy travelling companions.

And if they’re not planning to get together, why the big grins on both of their faces?

But, as promised, their car has a detour planned. One that takes them to an open field, where a big, red door stands, unconnected to anything.

Where could it lead? To a magic kingdom like Middle Earth or Narnia? Or somewhere more personal?

There’ll be more doors along the way, all leading to memories of key moments in both David and Sarah’s lives.

David’s first one takes him to a traumatic high school event. It was both his greatest triumph and his biggest heartbreak.

Because there she is – Cheryl, the girl who shattered his dreams, on the day he starred in the end-of-year, high-school musical. One that surprised me almost as much as it did Sarah.

J Pierrepont Finch is a name I haven’t heard since I was at grammar school in Guildford. I sat next to a chap called Shepherd Mead, a boy whose one distinction was his father – same name – wrote a book called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Which was turned into the musical David stars in at school.

And shortly after we suffer through David’s past traumas, another door whisks us to Sarah’s childhood and her guilt about somehow letting her mother down.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s very much a theatrical experience – brilliantly written and directed by, respectively, Seth Reiss and Korean-American director Kogonada.

And, by refusing to be a formulaic movie romantic comedy, it hits those spots that wouldn’t be reached if it just starred Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, say.

Beneath the film-star glamour of Robbie and Farrell there’s always been a fragility and sensitivity that lifted their performances in films like In Bruges and Barbie.

This film’s romantic, it’s often very funny, it’s touching – all those great adjectives. And yes, it’s big, it’s bold, it’s a beautiful journey.

Like J Pierrepont Finch, it manages to succeed without really trying.