In Review: 'A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,' 'Predators'

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Dir. Kogonada
109 min.

It’s hard to strike a tone that balances whimsy and world-weariness, much less sustain it for the length of a feature film. So, if nothing else, everyone involved with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey deserves some credit for trying. Set in a just-left-of-reality world, the film stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as, respectively, David and Sarah, two residents of an unnamed city who meet at the out-of-town wedding of a mutual friend. Neither minds traveling alone, or so they claim, and both arrive at the wedding in identical vehicles, a pair of 1994 Saturns on loan from a cavernous rental car agency staffed by a pair of oddballs (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline). Both have also succumbed to the agency’s hardsell techniques and agreed to rent a GPS system (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) with a habit of providing information and advice that goes well beyond the bounds of navigation. It’s weird, but David and Sarah roll with it. That’s something else they have in common.

As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem. Not only do we know that David and Sarah are obviously fated to end up together from the start, they behave as if they know it too and are alternately annoyed and excited by their inevitable pairing. It’s not that the characters lack chemistry, it's that it seems like a chemical reaction has already occurred and we’re now witnessing what it looks like when all the elements have settled into their new form. Sarah and David seem comfortable and companionable from the start, making their scenes together sweet but also kind of dull, as the GPS guides them through the big, bold, beautiful journey promised by the title. 

This turns out to be a trip through each character’s lives by way of a series of mysterious doors that opens to places of significance: a favorite museum, a high school on the night of the big musical, a lighthouse, a hospital, and so on. In each, Sarah and David get the chance to relive meaningful episodes from their past—sometimes on their own, sometimes with the other partner serving as a witness. It’s in these moments Reiss and Kogonada’s attempts to house the weightiest emotions imaginable inside a quirky, candy-colored fantasy frame start to make sense. In one scene David meets his father (Hamish Linklater) as a worried new parent who has no idea he’s talking to the adult version of his fragile, prematurely born son. In another, Sarah, transported back to childhood, gets to spend time with the mother (Lily Rabe) she lost to cancer. Both play as heartbreaking and true when they might easily have felt maudlin. The cast plays them with an openheartedness perfectly in sync with Kogonada’s precise filmmaking that suggests, yes, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s romance is perfunctory and the movie really exists to stage these disarming, bittersweet fantasies. The problem: the rest of the movie also exists. —Keith Phipps

The doors to A Big Bold Beautiful Journey open tonight.

Predators
Dir. David Osit
96 min. 

Making films or television shows involves directing the viewer’s eye, which means controlling what’s included inside the frame and what remains unseen. That thought is worth keeping in mind when watching Predators, David Osit’s extraordinary documentary about—or, better put, around—the early ’00s Dateline NBC series To Catch a Predator. Hosted by Chris Hansen, a broadcast journalist with the smug gait of moral authority, a typical segment would stage a sting operation with hidden cameras set up inside a house and police outside ready to arrest the target. Through online chat rooms, men expressing a sexual interest in children would be lured to the house and greeted by young actors posing as “decoys.” After a bit of back-and-forth, Hansen would emerge from an adjoining room, Candid Camera-style, and say something like, “What do you think you’re doing here?” and a follow-up, “Help me understand.” 

It’s that second query, “Help me understand,” that sticks in Osit’s craw and becomes the organizing force behind his rich, multi-layered documentary, which is about so much more than an exploitative TV show from 20 years ago. On the most superficial level, To Catch a Predator was largely understood as a win-win, a gripping reality-TV entertainment that did the public service of identifying pedophiles and snapping them up before they could harm real children. As the show took off, Hansen went on a media fun run, working his considerable charm on talk shows with Oprah Winfrey and Jimmy Kimmel. But outside the frame, the stories were inevitably darker and more complicated, and often lurched toward tragedy and injustice. 

Predators unfolds in phases, with Osit starting with a thorough history of To Catch a Predator as a production and cultural phenomenon before peeling back the layers. Osit gets interviews with a couple of the now-adult “decoys” who vividly remember their discomforting role in the process and how it led to moments that they’d like to regret, including the suicide of a Texas district attorney that would be the beginning of the end for the show. He explores the dodgy relationship between the producers and local authorities, which ostensibly benefitted from the partnership, but entrapment laws rendered the cases unprosecutable. The film then pivots into a legacy of To Catch a Predator, which has inspired an unsavory new generation of click-happy imitators on YouTube and brought Hansen out of the shadows. 

Were Predators merely about decrying a particularly gross moment in reality television, it would limit itself to being a piece of anti-nostalgia, with the show buried safely in the past. Yet “help me understand” serves as a brilliant animating force throughout the film, as Osit examines why people watched the show and what this performance of justice actually accomplished, which was not about seeking answers so much as reveling in ritual humiliation. Virtually everything that took place offscreen on To Catch a Predator would have unsettled viewers in a way the show did not intend in its tidily choreographed sting operations. The trauma radiating from the show—both the trauma it depicts and the trauma it inflicts—is an issue that Osit takes seriously and personally, leading to a third-act confrontation of immense power. Apart from anything else, Predators is a clinic in documentary ethics, but Osit’s intellect doesn’t mute his pain, sensitivity and outrage. It’s a film for the heart and the head. – Scott Tobias

Predators opens tomorrow at Film Forum in New York and rolls out from there.