Where'd You Go, Bernadette (And can you stay there?)

Where'd You Go Bernadette (2019) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for profanity and fleeting drug content
By Derrick Bang

Cate Blanchett’s starring performance in this film is breathtaking: a constantly mesmerizing display of nuance and manic emotional swings, which rise to mischievous playfulness and fall to shattered despair, frequently fueled by a stream-of-consciousness volley of half-finished thoughts and hopes.

Bernadette (Cate Blanchett, left) feigns delight when her daughter Bee (Emma Nelson)
gets accepted to the college-prep boarding school Choate ... but actually is dismayed that
her only child — and best friend — is about to move all the way to Connecticut.

Spending two hours with her character, however, is torture on par with root canal surgery.

Ten minute into this sorta-kinda dramedy, we’re ready to strangle her. Ten more minutes, and we’re eyeing the exits.

Television screenwriter-turned-novelist Maria Semple’s 2012 best-seller is an epistolary novel told mostly via emails, memos, letters and other documents, with occasional first-person commentary by 15-year-old Bee, as she attempts to unravel the “mystery” of her mother. Given that format, our sense of Bernadette develops second-hand, at something of a remove; her bitchy, scattered, nasty, socially unacceptable and self-destructive antics are filtered through the lens of a loving daughter.

Director/co-scripter Richard Linklater, in great contrast, thrusts Bernadette into our faces in real time. Watching her interact with other people — doing and saying the things that took place off-camera (so to speak) in the book — will tax the patience of even Blanchett’s most devoted fans.

The point of the story is that there’s a reason for Bernadette’s narcissistic and frankly intolerable behavior; that’s the “enigma” to be sussed by anybody masochistic enough to endure these personality flaws en route to the film’s (admittedly more satisfying) third act. But boy, getting there is a struggle.

Bernadette Fox is a boldly inventive architect whose imaginative creations once garnered a MacArthur Genius Grant. But that was 20 years ago, before she fled Los Angeles for a reclusive life in Seattle, where she and husband Elgie (Billy Crudup) settled in the shambling wreck of Straight Gate, a “house” that looks like it began life as a sanatorium. Any thoughts of renovating the place apparently vanished when only child Bee (Emma Nelson) arrived, and became the sole focus of Bernadette’s more lucid moments.

Two decades on, the house is an unkempt monstrosity, its haphazard artistic touches overwhelmed by a leaking roof, peeling wallpaper, chunks of fallen plaster and blackberry runners growing up through the carpet. Bee finds this magical, thanks to the forbearance of a worshipful teenage daughter who delights in adult eccentricity. 

But the notion that Elgie puts up with it — has put up with it for years — is beyond comprehension. We’re led to believe that his work as a brilliant Microsoft innovator has made him an often preoccupied, frequently absent husband and father … but still.

Because she’s mostly housebound, Bernadette delegates all activities — everything from grocery shopping to prescription drugs — to Manjula, a personal assistant based in India (!), who duly arranges all manner of Amazon shipments.

Before we go any further, yes: This is yet another serio-comic fantasy revolving around the “troubles” of tone-deaf, self-absorbed white people with more money than God. Isn’t it long past time to retire this by-now-very-tasteless archetype?

Anyway…

The aforementioned blackberry has become a veritable forest of brambles that shelter Bernadette from judgmental neighbors, the “mean moms” of Bee’s school friends, and anybody else foolish enough to cross the overgrown threshold. Said neighbors are typified by next door’s Audrey Griffin (Kristen Wiig), a Madame Fullcharge who expects her imperious views to rule during local parent/teacher gatherings.

Needless to say, Bernadette and Audrey loathe each other.

The “crisis” erupts when Bee reminds her parents of their long-ago promise to reward perfect middle school grades with “anything she wants.” What she wants is a trip to Antarctica, which Elgie agrees is a nifty idea; Bernadette, although attempting similar enthusiasm, immediately panics at the thought of having to (gasp) travel, and (oh, the horror) interact with other people in the confines of a cruise ship.

Interpersonal complications ensue, events spiral out of control, and — quite suddenly — Bernadette vanishes. Elgie and Bee are left to wonder what the heck has happened, and where she has gone. (Hence the story’s title.)

Except that Linklater and his co-scripters — Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. — immediately undercut any sense of “mystery,” by (once again) revealing subsequent events in real time. There’s little suspense to be gained, when we’re able to watch precisely what happens (as also foreshadowed by the ill-advised flash-forward with which Linklater opens this film).

Blanchett is incandescent in a role that surpasses her similarly immersive, Academy Award-winning performance in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. No question: She’s a stunning actress. And yes, her character-defining journey here becomes more intriguing when Linklater slides into the third act, at which point the story contemplates the true nature of “genius.” 

Whether such late revelations will compensate for more than an hour of insufferable boorishness, is up to the individual viewer.

Nelson is effervescent charm and bubbly enthusiasm personified, in one of the best film debuts I’ve seen in awhile. Bee is a stalwart daughter — her mother’s fiercest protector — and yet Nelson shades the role with vulnerability and contemplative, not-entirely-concealed despair. She owns a telling scene, as a horrified witness to Audrey’s verbal evisceration of Bernadette, particularly when the infuriated neighbor takes a shot at Bee, as well.

In the aftermath, Nelson’s crestfallen silence speaks volumes.

Wiig is equally strong in a role that takes a sharp left turn as the story proceeds: an extremely difficult transition that’s essential to the story. Wiig pulls it off.

Crudup is … uneven. Elgie’s quieter moments with Bee are played well, as is his rising, impotent anguish over his wife’s exponentially increasing instability. But at other times Crudup behaves like a zombie in a Quaalude fog; we want to slap some life into him. Nor is he the slightest bit persuasive as a “Microsoft genius.”

Some familiar faces pop up in (mostly) brief roles: Laurence Fishburne and Steve Zahn, as architectural colleagues; and Judy Greer, as a rather condescending psychologist (psychiatrist?).

Then there’s Zoe Chao, woefully ill-served in a bizarrely undefined role as Soo-Lin: a neighborhood fixture introduced as Audrey’s lackey, and then hired as Elgie’s new personal assistant. The degree to which Soo-Lin subsequently insinuates herself into Elgie’s personal life — with his forbearance (!) — is beyond weird. Soo-Lin’s role in Semple’s book is far better clarified, and while this on-screen version leans in that direction, Linklater never makes up his mind.

The result is a superfluous, clumsy character cast hopelessly adrift.

Bruce Curtis’ production design is top-notch, both in terms of Straight Gate’s wincingly ghastly state of disrepair, and the opulent wretched excess that characterizes Audrey’s home, and the environment inhabited by her boorishly aristocratic neighbors. Costume designer Kari Perkins evokes a strong sense of the Pacific Northwest with her chic outfits.

Graham Reynolds’ underscore is unremarkable, and you’ll leave the theater hoping never again to hear Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”

Linklater, a generally solid director known for coaxing strong performances from the stars of Before Sunrise (and its sequels) and Boyhood, appears to have met his match with Bernadette Fox. Blanchett and Nelson notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine why anybody should spend two hours with this clumsy, off-putting saga.