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.
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| 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.
