Based upon the novel by Maria Semple
Screenplay Written by Richard Linklater & Holly Gent & Vincent Palmo Jr.
Directed by Richard Linklater
**1/2 (two and a half stars)
RATED PG 13
Books are books and movies are movies.
This has been my ever-present mantra concerning the adaptation of novels to the silver screen although it is not the easiest transition to accomplish for a host of reasons including the nature of the source material itself and if the written work can even be translated to a visual medium plus the idea of having just the right people involved to create such a translation, therefore, a new interpretation of an author's vision.
In the case of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," it seemed on paper that the presence of Cate Blanchett and Writer/Director Richard Linklater would be a perfect fit for Author Maria Semple's unorthodox novel which utilized e-mails, transcripts, memos and other documents to weave the tale of the elusive Bernadette Fox, a one-time genius architect who becomes an embittered agoraphobic and one day vanishes from her bewildered family, leaving her 15 year old daughter Bee to piece together the truth of her Mother's past as well as her present whereabouts. Certainly, Blanchett would be more than up to the task of playing a difficult, complex protagonist and just looking at Linklater's own idiosyncratic filmography, he would feel to be a perfect filmmaker to crack the code of the novel and therefore helm an invigorating feature.
So why is the end result so pedestrian?
Richard Linklater's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" is well meaning and well intentioned but ultimately, bland. While there are some strong performances and an especially perceptive mid-section, for whatever reasons, the film never congeals into a sumptuous whole, making for proceedings that are lighter than a helium balloon taking flight and nowhere near as fun or compelling to view. No, it is not a bad film. I have seen much worse, trust me. But what is here to screen is simply and sadly muted when it needed to be vibrantly unpredictable in its comedy, satire, drama and slice-of-life qualities.
As with the source material, "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" stars Cate Blanchett as Bernadette Fox, the aforementioned genius architect who is now a Seattle based, unhappy agoraphobic, married to Microsoft tech genius Elgin (Billy Crudup) and loving Mother to Bee (Emma Nelson).
Consumed with anxieties, both private and social, bitterness, anger, insomnia, depression and fits of mania, Bernadette is the bane of existence to the posh Mothers of the private school and neighborhood, most especially Audrey Griffin (Kristin Wiig) and her sidekick (and soon to be Elgin's office assistant) Soo-Lin Lee-Segal (Zoe Chao), plus also a source on increased worry and desperation in Elgin. Only the relationship between Bernadette and Bee feels unshakable as Bee has long accepted her Mother upon her own terms and appreciates her greatly for her eccentricities.
Once Bee's excellent grades at school earn her a family trip to Antarctica over the Winter break, Bernadette begins to spiral further out of control, leading to her surprising disappearance beginning a mystery that uncovers the truth of the inscrutable maze that is indeed Bernadette Fox.
Returning to that motto I presented at the outset of this review, I will say that it was indeed a daring move for Richard Linklater to take the novel's titular character, a figure who is not really seen terribly much, therefore giving the novel its large sense of mystery, and present her front and center for this film.
Yes, I do understand that if one hires Cate Blanchett for a leading role, she will be uniformly prevalent on-screen butt he fact that she is seen from one end of the film to another does dilute the element of mystery greatly. That being said, I do not think that it hindered the film because what Linklater has achieved with "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," is to give the title a double meaning, moving the emphasis markedly from Bernadette's physical whereabouts to more internally, as we investigate and explore Bernadette's mental state.
It is a pet peeve of mine in the movies when characters are presented with crystal clear mental illnesses yet not one person within the film ever, at any time, addresses those issues for what they are. This was a quality that I absolutely loathed in films like James L. Brooks' "Spanglish" (2004) and Craig Gillespie's "Lars And The Real Girl" (2007), for instance, films that felt to be afraid to tackle their own subject matter.
With "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," Richard Linklater circumvents this error by focusing the film entirely upon Bernadette Fox's dwindling mental state. Whether she is manically creating voice-to-text e-mails to her India based personal assistant Manjula, having yet one more neighborly battle with Audrey, collecting a jar filled with all manner of loose medications, desperately fretting over the trip to Antarctica and trying her mightiest to stay away from all people aside from her family, to even the wildly dilapidated visual and physical state of her home, we are placed firmly in the center of Bernadette's psychosis.
The first third of the film serves as our introduction, which is pretty decent as we see Bernadette's dark present compared with her considerably brighter past when she was at the peak of her creative powers and prowess, creating architectural works unlike anything her peers had the ability to achieve for themselves.
This juxtaposition allowed Linklater to explore the concept of what happens when a creative figure is placed into a life situation where she is no longer creating. To that end, Linklater has also created a sharp social commentary regarding the roles of professional Women in society and provides the question of whether it is up to the family matriarch to relinquish her professional dreams in order to raise a family while the patriarch continues his own professional ascent.
It is once we arrive at the film's mid-section, when certain plot elements become more dire, we see how the film's larger conceptual elements become more personal as the Fox family find themselves reaching a crossroads. Linklater stages two crucial but separate conversations, Elgin with a therapist (played by the wonderful Judy Greer) and Bernadette with a former architectural colleague (played by the great Laurence Fishburne also making the most of his scant screen time), each occurring at the same time, giving the impression that this married couple is having a dialogue with each other although they are apart.
The hard questions each character asks of themselves as well as of each other was the point when I felt that the film was beginning to gather some steam, some weight to the proceedings that had generally been fairly easy and breezy to that point. Questions of mental illness and how it can affect a family dynamic, in addition to how it upends one's sense of self worth and overall well being was deeply compelling and both Blanchett and Crudup were equal to the task in a series of well constructed and dramatically strong scenes, making me excited that this film version, while different than the novel, would be making a strong stamp of its own right.
And yet, it blinked.
Certainly, when adapting the novel to film, Richard Linklater would go so far as to completely re-write what Maria Semple has already created within her own literary work. But even so, the film did have to return to its central mystery and a voyage to Antarctica, which, to me, felt to lessen the conceptual blow (and if memory serves, I just may have felt something similar when reading the novel years ago).
To me, this was a situation where it felt that Linklater had a chance to be especially innovative and spiral from the novel to create something entirely new as the film's first two thirds felt to be leading to a darker, more turbulent and decidedly emotional place than where it eventually ended up. Frankly, the film lost some of its steam and therefore, its purpose, making for an experience that ended up being more than a little pat, visually flat despite the locale and emotionally no deeper than an episode of "Eight Is Enough."
Which is a shame considering the potential for a great film considering the pedigree of talent in front of and behind the camera. But you know, I wonder if these were the right people for this material. As I watched the film, and as I ruminate over it right now, I cannot help but to think what if the triumvirate of Director Jason Reitman, Writer Diablo Cody and Charlize Theron, the creative team behind the searing satire of "Young Adult" (2011) and "Tully" (2018), would have accomplished with the same material. For some reason, that combination feels better.
But, I am not able tor review what isn't. I can only review what is. And for me, Richard Linklater's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" is a near miss. Not as funny or as dramatic as it needed to be if it was going to ultimately be as rewarding and as idiosyncratic of an experience as the architectural designs of Bernadette Fox herself.
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