Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Film: Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne
Director: Richard Linklater
Oscar History: Though it didn't score with Oscar, Cate Blanchett did get a surprise Globes nomination for Best Actress.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In just a couple of days, I will be announcing my Top 10 lists for 2019 (it'll be Sunday & Monday), and as a result I'm trying to get through a couple of last-minute screenings.  One of those was a movie I had every intention of seeing when it was in theaters when it was out in August, but for some reason it alluded me, despite there not being a lot of major films in theaters at the time.  The film's reviews were paltry, and the box office poor, but I see pretty much every Cate Blanchett movie, and I definitely see anything that Richard Linklater crafts together (three of his films were on my Top 10's in past years of this decade), but the film just never happened.  As I felt that Linklater's perch as one of my favorite directors of the decade required me to get this done before I completed 2019, this has become one of the last three screenings I'll do before the "end" of 2019.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the bestselling novel by Maria Semple, the movie is about Bernadette (Blanchett), a brilliant architect who has become increasingly antisocial & isolated in the years since her greatest triumph (an environmentally-conscious house) was destroyed by a callous neighbor.  In the years since, she's become less responsive to her husband Elgin (Crudup) and relies on her daughter Bee (Nelson) for most of her human connection.  Her world comes to a head when Bernadette's neighbor Audrey (Wiig) has her house flooded because Bernadette removes some bushes (on Audrey's request), knowing that doing so will cause a mudslide into Audrey's house.  Things get worse for her when it's revealed that she's been accidentally using an identity thief as a personal assistant, and her husband wants to send her to a mental health facility to get past her anxiety issues.  Instead, Bernadette runs away from him, stays with Audrey (and apologizes) & then goes on the trip to Antarctica that her daughter wanted them to take as a family alone, eventually discovering a project while in the southern continent to redesign a science facility, thus reigniting her passion for architecture, her family, and her life.

The movie is very different than the book, something I didn't know from reading the book, but seeking out a description of it afterward as it was hard to tell what was missing in this movie that had somehow been present in Semple's massive bestseller.  In the book, Elgin is much more of an ass (he has an affair with his assistant while Bernadette is missing), and the mystery is actually a mystery, not something we see explained pretty much the second Bernadette disappears.  This makes much more sense, as Bernadette the film is a movie with very little stakes.

Stakes, if you look at his filmography, is not Richard Linklater's forte.  Films like Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and Everybody Wants Some! are bright masterpieces, but if there are stakes they're ancillary to the plot, which is essentially just looking at characters and letting the story shape around them as you film.  This isn't obviously how they're written (they have plots-this isn't a Terrence Malick film), but his talent as a director is in finding the stories that happen in our everyday life that shape us as people, not using characters in a more traditional sense-we don't always have an understanding of what is important in this world.  Given a novel to confine himself and his writing, Linklater struggles.  The movie has occasional moments of interest (the scenes in Antarctica are the only ones where Linklater and Blanchett's uneven performance work), but this is a creative failure even if it's an intriguing one.  Every time you think you like Bernadette, he holds back, not letting us free into the world of this fascinating, complicated woman, and no amount of lovingly-framed architecture is going to change that.  This is worthwhile only if you're a Linklater or Blanchett completist, but don't expect anything more than missed opportunities.