A Big Bold Beautiful Journey suffers from an important element of the screenplay despite the same writer nailing that aspect in their previous film, The Menu. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a whimsical approach to questions about romance. Starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has been suffering critically,

Critics have been focusing on the film’s forced romantic storyline, with Screen Rant’s Mae Abdulbaki calling it “a study in manufactured sentimentality.” The most surprising thing about the film is one of the specific ways it falters on the scripted level, especially because it comes from one of the minds behind Ralph Fiennes’ The Menu.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Should Work, But Doesn’t On A Fundamental Level

Despite having a lot of great ingredients, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey falters story-wise — which is a real shame, because it shares a screenwriter with The Menu and that movie succeeded in exactly all the ways this one fails. On the surface, the fantastical romantic dramedy doesn’t have much in common with The Menu‘s pitch-black comedy and social satire.

However, both movies are stacked with impressive actors, are sH๏τ beautifully, and share a screenwriter. The difference in execution comes down to the story and the script, which is where the movies share the most creative DNA. Seth Reiss is a writer on both A Big Bold Beautiful Journey and The Menu, but they land completely differently.

A big part of the problem with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is the way it approaches a fantastical story. Traveling through mysterious doors to explore Sarah and David’s regrets and heartbreaks, the movie wants to be something like Stranger than Fiction or The Life of Chuck, absurdist and just self-aware enough to be funny while character-specific to be emotionally effective.

The problem is that Sarah and David are too basic, with little to define them outside their romantic hang-ups and motivations. There’s no indication of their internal or external lives beyond those very straightforward characteristics of “bad at relationships” and “lonely.” They’re too broad of characters, and love stories are at their best in their specifics.

David and Sarah meet at a wedding for mutual friends, but there’s no indication of what kind of people they’d be friends with. There’s no real hint at their jobs, their ambitions, their desires outside of one another. While they relive memories and experiences, there’s little context given surrounding these developments outside of reinforcing the traits the film has already hammered home.

Sarah and David are meant to be fairly broad, so their love story can be relatable on a larger scale; they still need to have enough specificity to feel like real characters instead of just archetypes. As a result, they can come off as one-note and even a bit absurd; they become sketches of characters instead of people with depth.

That’s where The Menu succeeded from a scripting standpoint, and where A Big Bold Beautiful Journey stumbles. Both are inherently absurd stories, with characters meant to represent these archetypes of modern society. However, The Menu made every character feel painfully real in a way Sarah and David simply aren’t.

The Key Reason The Menu Works Is Missing From A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

The Menu is about a plethora of wealthy stereotypes (and a single unᴀssuming regular woman) who find themselves caught in a brutal act of defiance and self-destruction by a master chef. It’s an undeniably odd story. However, the film’s tension, humor, and emotion derive from the character beats, interactions, and layers.

Everyone in The Menu, even characters with little dialogue, feels like they have a sense of personality and shame. It grounded the story emotionally, which in turn kept the audience engaged even as the story became more bizarre. It kept the movie from meandering, ensuring the thematic arc carried throughout. In short, The Menu has a truly remarkable script.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has big ideas about love in the same way The Menu is about a larger society. However, it lacks that sense of personality that made The Menu engrossing on a personal level. The result is a fantastical adventure for Sarah and David that becomes boring.

Every interaction with the past carries the same regretful tone, rarely revealing more than basic characteristics that they then over-explain. The back-and-forth character comedy of The Menu is replaced by standard rom-com patter. The characters don’t change their views on one another, just come to accept the risk of love as an option at all.

At points, it even feels like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey wants to poke fun at the conventions of the genre, as in more overt comedies like They Came Together. However, the movie then reverts back to those romantic beats with a sincerity that leaves the movie’s true perspective on the nature of love and compromise unclear.

A focus on character was crucial to The Menu, a thematically rich movie with a lot to say about not just society and classism but happiness, fulfillment, and the cost of ambition. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey clearly wants to do something similar with romance and contentment, but it just says things instead of exploring concepts through character growth.

Instead, David and Sarah have conversations with their parents, admit to their own failings, and the movie thinks they’re better. Other romantic dramedies like The Matrialists have been able to accomplish that intent, largely by keeping the characters clear and refusing to let them simply get by on charm while forcing them to change and actually confront their failings.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t have the core character focus that it needed, which would have improved the emotional arcs. It doesn’t give the characters arcs to grow with, just a moral to learn. The cast and creatives on the film are all talented, including Seth Reiss. There are ideas that could have blossomed into something better.

However, by going too broad with the characters in their story, the overall execution suffers. It’s all the more surprising because of how well Reiss nailed those aspects in The Menu, making his latest movie even more frustrating in retrospect. I wanted to like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, but it just doesn’t work.