Movie Review: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Richard Linklater.

Written by: Richard Linklater & Holly Gent & Vincent Palmo Jr. based on the novel by Maria Semple.

Starring: Cate Blanchett (Bernadette Fox), Billy Crudup (Elgie), Emma Nelson (Bee Branch), Kristen Wiig (Audrey), Judy Greer (Dr. Kurtz), Troian Bellisario (Becky), Laurence Fishburne (Paul), Claudia Doumit (Iris), Zoe Chao (Soo-Lin), Katelyn Statton (Vivian), Kate Easton (Tammy).

 

Richard Linklater is always at his best when he simply allows his characters to exist, rather than forcing them into a plot of some kind. He excels at hangout movies – or even movies that simply narratively drift – movies that have plots, but those plots don’t really matter. He also has a soft spot for artists – particularly artists who cannot quite figure out how to create. Artists who talk a lot, but for some reasons cannot quite put it together to create something. That is probably what drew him to Where’d You Go, Bernadette – the story of a genius level architect who has essentially been hiding from, well everything except her family, for two decades. But at some point, the movie gets away from him – probably because the film really does need to jump through quite a few narrative hoops, to get where it’s going – and it’s more than a little far-fetched. The film also tries to be more a comedy than perhaps it should be – and tries to soften its lead character a little too much, make her more likable than she probably should be. It’s an odd little film.

 

Bernadette is played by the great Cate Blanchett – an actress who can pretty much do anything, and is fine here – although you kind of wish she let loose just a tiny bit more – risked alienating the audience a little bit more, by making Bernadette more unlikable. Audiences will likely feel that way anyway – as much of what Bernadette does in the film is objectively awful. The trick would have been to make her do that awful stuff, and still like her – whereas here, it makes it all too lightweight.

 

Bernadette lives in Seattle with her husband Elgie (Billy Crudup) – who created a company bought by Microsoft, and now works there – so obviously they have a lot of money, and their teenage daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) – about to enter high school. Bernadette hates Seattle – and everyone in it – who isn’t Elgie or Bee. She has been conducting a passive aggressive war with the other mothers – gnats as she calls them – led by her neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) for years, and it is ramping up. Bernadette was a genius level architect in L.A. 20 years ago – like actually winning a MacArthur Genius Grant level genius – but she hasn’t designed anything since. An easier movie would have blamed Elgie – or domesticity – on this, but this movie doesn’t. It’s more complicated than that. Elgie is a nice guy – a supportive guy – but not exactly an attentive guy. His wife has drifted further and further into her “eccentricities” – and he hasn’t noticed, or cared. What sets her off in this film is that Bee has determined that the three of them should take a family trip to Antarctica. Bernadette hates to travel – she hates other people after all – but she cannot say no to Bee. Over the next few weeks, things will pile up and up and up on Bernadette, and she’ll dig herself deeper and deeper and deeper.

 

I can see a version of this movie working. I read the best-selling book by Maria Semple a few years ago, and think that Linklater and company were right to change directions her a little bit, make it more focuses on Bernadette than anyone else. I don’t think the structure of the novel would work as a film. However, making the changes it does to the plot is a different story. Almost all of them seem to have been made to soften the story – lighten it up, and wrap it up in a happy fashion. And it doesn’t really fit.

 

That is because Bernadette is a thorny character. The film is, in a way, another How Stella Got Her Groove Back – we’ve seen quite a few over the years, where bored middle aged women, weighed down by cheating or boring husband, and unfulfilling careers, got out and rediscover themselves. But Bernadette is a different type of character. She isn’t a “normal” person – she is a genius, and getting her groove back is not as simple as getting a new man, etc. The film is really about what happens when a genius doesn’t create – when they grow complacent and bored, and where that energy goes. You cannot really blame the other mothers for hating Bernadette – she isn’t nice to them, and doesn’t even pretend to care. You cannot blame others for thinking there is something wrong with her – she does things that would raise concerns in others. When you have that genius brain – and don’t use it – things aren’t going to go well.

 

Blanchett was undeniably the right choice for this role – she has been able to play characters who are undeniably awful and unsympathetic – and still hold an audience (I’m thinking of her Oscar winning role in Blue Jasmine for example. And she can also be quite funny when she wants to be. Here, I think she’s let down by the screenplay – which wants to flatten her character too much. She comes alive a few times – a long rant to Laurence Fishburne for example – but mostly, she is stuck playing Bernadette as “eccentric” more than anything else. She is better near the end of the movie – having found some sort of peace.

 

Basically, I think Where’d You Go Bernadette is a film that had a tremendously complex character at its core, and somehow blew it – somehow didn’t know what they had, and tried too hard to make her likable, make the movie light and comic. A more daring movie would raise a lot of troubling questions – and this one basically chickens out. And that’s disappointing, because Blanchett could have killed that role – the role she should have been playing.

 

As for Linklater, it’s another film that shows he’s drifting a little – still, since his biggest career achievement of Boyhood in 2014. His follow-up to that was Everybody Wants Some!! – a film that has grown on me, and makes sense a little bit – Linklater getting back to basics in what really was a film like Dazed and Confused. Since then, there have been two adaptations – Last Flag Flying, and now this, neither have been close to his best work (although I like Last Flag Flying more than some, again, when the mechanisms of the plot force itself on that movie, it’s at its weakest). Here’s hoping that whatever he does next, it helps get him back on track – then again, off track is where Linklater is at his best.