Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, was a best-seller and a beloved favorite of many readers (including this one) when it came out in 2012. Told largely via text messages and emails and other documents, with additional narration from Bernadette’s teenage daughter, its unusual form made it a challenge to turn into a movie.
But writer-director Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise) has crafted a film of unusual form that encompasses the novel’s quirkiness without attempting to imitate it. Working from a screenplay he wrote with Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. (who co-wrote Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles), the director shifts the focus from eighth-grader Bee (Emma Nelson) to Bernadette herself, in the person of Cate Blanchett. Then he takes the audience on a schizophrenic journey through this family’s life that’s worthy of the spectacularly odd woman at its center.
Blanchett nabbed her second Oscar for portraying a mentally unbalanced woman in Blue Jasmine, but Bernadette is not that far gone. A once-famous architect turned stay-at-home mom, she’s erratic, eccentric, and thoroughly entertaining. Whether she’s also unbalanced is the movie’s central question.
The actress may be one of the few who could hold together Linklater’s vision for a movie that’s part farce, part intervention, and part melodrama. Bernadette’s battle with her proper suburban neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig) encompasses all the movie’s facets, from broad comedy (a snooty party interrupted by a Bernadette-incited natural disaster) to bonding (as Audrey decides whether to aid Bernadette’s disappearance, the escape that gives the movie its title).
Linklater enjoys exploring absurdity and interpersonal dynamics with equal enthusiasm, and Where’d You Go gives him the opportunity to meld the two. Bernadette’s husband, Elgie, is played by Billy Crudup, in the sensitive straight guy mode he perfected in 20th Century Women, but this time with a layer of tech savvy, as a Microsoft programming star (the movie is set in Seattle). Newcomer Nelson is a charmer as the daughter, handling her big standoff with Wiig and Blanchett with aplomb.
The actual plot would sound either mad or dull in summary, so suffice it to say that Bernadette is a larger-than-life mom who faces a crisis and disappears. She winds up in Antarctica (not a spoiler, since that’s where the movie opens), the images of which add an additional, sort of spiritual dimension to the movie. (Except for some second-unit shots, the part of Antarctica is played by Greenland.)
The plot, though, is not the point. The joy of Bernadette, not surprisingly, is Blanchett digging into another complicated, brilliant, insecure character — and really, isn’t that enough? If it’s not, there are cameos from a host of other fine actors such as Megan Mullally and Lawrence Fishburne, and the ever under-used Judy Greer is on hand as a psychiatrist.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is going to be a difficult movie for Linklater scholars to characterize, with elements of his ensemble comedies (Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!!), off-beat character studies (Bernie, Orson Welles), and ambitious dramas (Boyhood, the Before trilogy). It’s not quite a shaggy dog story, but any movie that encompasses tech culture and penguin mating practices is bound to seem somewhat scattered in focus. Still, some of the best film journeys take viewers on seemingly capricious itineraries toward a satisfying if unexpected destination. In Bernadette, the endpoint is a message about the inexplicability of creativity, a subject entirely appropriate to its quirky format.
Grade: B-plus. Rated PG-13. Playing at the AMC River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Annapurna Distribution)
