Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Quick Impressions:
At this point, I’ve been trying to see Where’d You Go, Bernadette? for what feels like most of my adult life (but is actually two weeks). Richard Linklater’s latest effort has not been getting great reviews, and our current theater of choice dropped the evening showing just a week after the movie opened. But I love Cate Blanchett, so when I hear complaints that the film is 90 percent Blanchett talking, I think, “In other words, the perfect movie!”
Actually I’ve been a bit apprehensive about dragging my husband so far out of our way to see this. Dragging is the wrong word since he’s always cheerfully game for any film I want to watch. He even went with me to Magic Mike (though when lightning struck the theater halfway through, neither of us was enthusiastic enough to return for an encore. We still haven’t gotten around to watching the second half). I don’t read others’ reviews before writing my own, but when two weeks have gone by, you can’t help hearing stuff, and everything I heard was bad.
To be honest, though I remained undeterred in my desire to see Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, by the time I actually got the chance, I fully expected the movie to be heart-breakingly mediocre.
“At least you’ll get to write a negative review,” my husband offered cheerily as I writhed in agony, second guessing my decision to buy tickets (yet slavishly committed to a choice I found indefensible). I thought at best the movie would be terrible.
But it wasn’t.
I’m so glad I listened to my gut and saw this film. I’m a bit confused about how poorly it’s been received. I absolutely loved it. I found it continually fascinating, genuinely moving, and almost shockingly relatable (to me).
In fact, as I watched this movie, I kept thinking of that episode of The Simpsons where they put on a school play to convince Mr. Burns to donate money to save Springfield Elementary. The play imagines a dystopian future in which Springfield residents lacking a basic education perform their jobs negligently, resulting in the death of Mr. Burns. With worried eyes fixed intently on the stage, Burns remarks, “This play really speaks to me!”
That’s how strongly I identified with the themes and conflicts in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. In some ways, I felt like I was watching a movie about my own life.
“I thought she was so much like me,” I remarked to my husband after the movie. (I find it helpful to say things like this right at the start of a conversation because what if I didn’t notice? The discussion would be so awkward for him as he tactfully hinted around to get my thoughts.)
This movie struck a chord with me. I laughed and cried multiple times and definitely enjoyed not only Blanchett’s excellent performance but also the work of the entire supporting cast, particularly young Emma Nelson with whom Blanchett has amazing chemistry. I would love to watch this film with my daughter. I know she would enjoy it and (unfortunately) relate to it.
The Good:
This movie is the perfect antidote to the way mental illness is often depicted in movies. Too often movies leave us with the idea that mental illness might as well be a death sentence. They seem to suggest that if you admit that something is wrong with you, happiness is out of reach. It’s unattainable. You don’t deserve it. You’re broken.
So many movie protagonists are victims of gaslighting. They’re made to believe they’re losing their minds, but then it turns out that–surprise!–evil people were actually tricking them. They were sane all along. So it’s okay for them to be happy. (Old movies also do that with glasses. “You don’t need these ugly glasses, after all! Your eyes are stronger now! You have perfect vision! Without those glasses you shouldn’t have been wearing, you’re beautiful!”)
Guess what? You can have mental illness and still be happy.
That’s one thing I love about this film. It shows us so many aspects of Bernadette, reveals her so clearly and fully. People do misunderstand Bernadette. But make no mistake, she does actually have psychiatric problems. She has massive social anxiety and she has reached a point of concerning dysfunction. So it’s not all some big misunderstanding. Bernadette struggles with mental illness. But she is also a loving mother with a close and mutually rewarding relationship with her daughter. And she is also a brilliant architect, a creative genius.
I also have almost crippling social anxiety. (I certainly don’t feel hostility toward neighbors who volunteer to do all the school things, though. I love outgoing people who volunteer to do all the things!) But I do probably seem very weird sometimes in public. (I know I feel very weird.)
The trailers for this film gave me the idea that Bernadette is some sort of misanthrope, but a closer look shows that’s not what’s going on at all. Most of her hostility is the result of anxiety. Some of it, too, clearly stems from a trauma in her past when something unthinkably horrible (and understandably damaging) happened to her. I was already on Bernadette’s side, but my sympathy for her somehow still increased in the wake of this revelation of her trauma. (It’s so obscenely horrible, worse than the scene in Little Women that always stresses my younger sister out and often prompted her to plead, “I would never do that to you!” Talk about relating to a story! When we watched that Winona Ryder version, we felt like we actually were Jo and Amy.)
Cate Blanchett’s performance is nothing short of amazing. She’s one of my favorite actresses. I like everything she does, but as Bernadette, she’s truly exceptional. Even if there were no final act, I would cheerfully watch an entire feature length film of her ruminating on her frustrations in a crumbling house. In fact, I like the early, slower, less focused scenes of the movie better than the ending (which though action-packed, feels a trifle contrived). Blanchett’s central performance is by far the best part of the film, and I like Bernadette best as it slowly teases out the secrets of the tormented titular character.
Honestly, Blanchett’s strong, nuanced performance is so riveting that the film doesn’t need to do anything else to succeed. I would highly recommend this movie to Blanchett fans and film buffs on the strength of the performance alone. It’s certainly a must watch for lovers of her Oscar winning performance in Blue Jasmine. I am amazed that she’s capable of portraying two such disturbed women (both of whom appear highly unpleasant on the surface) who are so deeply different from one another on closer examination. Talk about a gift for nuance! What an actress! It’s one thing to be able to play a “crazy” person once and quite another to pull off portraying multiple disturbed people. Jasmine and Bernadette are not the same. Left to a less gifted performer, they easily could be. (Jack Nicholson is also a bit underrated as a portrayer of multiple crazy people.) (I know it seems weird to call a star of his stature underrated, but a lot of people seem to think he just plays himself all the time, which is not true.)
The cast supporting her is also very good. Billy Crudup is easy to believe as an absent husband and father checked out from his family. (His character in this is often frustrating but kind of funny, too. His wife is supposed to be the one with issues, but he’s obviously not great with communication either. While his wife has been drifting farther and farther from the norm, he’s been busy creating software to read his thoughts. As an absolute last resort, he suddenly decides, “Maybe it’s time to talk to someone!”) I’ve never warmed to Billy Crudup, but I must grudgingly admit that I enjoyed his performance here.
Kristen Wiig is great as Audrey, the “annoying” next-door-neighbor. (She’s so annoying that she puts herself in charge of all the socially taxing, tedious work, organizes it, and then does it all! How annoying!) (Seriously, for a long time, the one thing I couldn’t figure out about Bernadette is her animosity for this neighbor who has taken it upon herself to do all the social stuff at the school that Bernadette hates doing and doesn’t want to do. Isn’t that the person you should appreciate from afar? Later, though, the source of all this baffling neighbor rage is revealed.) Wiig does a good job of letting us see the humanity in Audrey even when her behavior is grating, and even though the protagonist despises her.
Meanwhile, Zoe Chao is excellent at making Audrey’s friend Soo-Lin genuinely unlikable.
Judy Greer shows up as the world’s most irritating therapist whose practices I question. (How can you diagnose a patient you’ve never met or talked to?) This must be the therapist you call if you’re alarmed yourself and want a professional to jump to the most alarming conclusions imaginable so that you feel validated!) I love Judy Greer (largely because of her work on Arrested Development), but she seems to play characters who drive me crazy in so many movies. (Remember Jurassic World? “Why aren’t you taking total responsibility for my children’s happiness, Claire?”)
Laurence Fishburne is good in a small but pivotal role. (A lot of famous faces show up in small parts. Megan Mullally. Steve Zahn.) (Actually those two are the most famous people in the smallest parts. Mullally gets to deliver some rather crucial information, though, and she does it well.)
Perhaps the best performance (after Blanchette’s) is given by newcomer Emma Nelson as Bernadette’s daughter Bee. The two have fantastic chemistry when they share the screen, and somehow even when they don’t. Much of what makes the movie work (even when things take a turn for the improbable) is the powerful connection between the mother and daughter. We believe that relationship. And because Bernadette is able to be her authentic self around her daughter, there is at least one person who actually knows and understands her, even though she has such a hard time connecting and interacting most of the time. Nelson’s performance is so natural and unaffected. Instead of thinking about what she was doing as an actress, I simply believed her as Bernadette’s daughter and got deeply emotionally invested in their bond.
I’ve seen promotional material describing this film as a comedy and a mystery, which I will generously call misleading. (Probably the biggest mystery is why the film would be described this way!) The titular question doesn’t have that much to do with Bernadette’s physical disappearance near the end of the film. (Though Miss Marple herself would probably be stumped by her first stop!) As I understand it, “Where’d you go, Bernadette?” is more of a philosophical question, suggesting that the character has somehow lost herself during her directionless years in Seattle. But the movie isn’t necessarily about getting lost. It’s more about how it feels when someone cares enough to come looking for you. Bernadette’s disappearance from the LA architecture scene may not have provoked the response she hoped for, but this time there is someone deeply invested in finding her.
At heart, this is a film about the beauty and power of human connection, and the dramatization of these truths is doubly powerful since the protagonist is a prickly recluse with social anxiety. Bernadette seems to hate people, yet she’s the hero of a story about what it means to love.
I’ve never read Maria Semple’s celebrated novel, (though I probably will now), but I’ve heard that it’s partially epistolary, and that definitely comes through in the film. We get a number of creative methods of narration, including information revealed by a video on a laptop, a series of dictated texts, and the vocalized thoughts of Bernadette’s daughter. (It’s voice-over narration in the film, but I imagine it must be diary entries or something in the book.) I enjoyed this multifaceted method of story telling, and also the film’s emphasis on the fact that perspective is crucial. I have no idea if this is a good adaptation of the source novel, but I can say that the movie feels extremely literary. My husband and I noticed so much symbolism (a mudslide of symbolism even).
I didn’t notice the film’s score, but I did find some of the visuals captivating, though (somewhat oddly) I found more interesting things to look at in Bernadette’s crumbling labyrinthine home than in the location scenes of Antarctica (which I think were actually shot in Greenland).
Best Scene Visually:
For some reason, I liked the elegant simplicity of the scene of Bernadette and her daughter in the car, singing “Time After Time.” The choice of song is clearly no accident. We see here the deep connection between the pair, and what kind of relationship they have, how much the two of them love each other. (That’s one of the nicest things, actually. We don’t just see that Bernadette loves Bee. We see that Bee loves Bernadette, too. And she knows who she is.) The chemistry the two actresses have in this scene is off the charts. I completely believe them as a mother-daughter pair. (The “Time After Time” lyrics honestly make a moment a bit heavy-handed as written, but the actors are so in sync. They show us the complex dynamics in this relationship so clearly, and make it all look so natural, so real.)
But the reason I’m calling this the Best Scene Visually, is that it stood out to my eye. Everything seemed clean and simple. It just looked good. And that shows us that yes, the house is cluttered to the point of madness, and the world is frightening and teeming with crowds and chaos, but there in the car (with its muted colors, clean lines, and small, clean space) it is just mother and daughter, and everything makes sense.
Best Scene:
So many scenes of Bernadette’s dysfunction strongly resonated with me, and I laughed several times (though I would hardly call this a comedy. It’s more like an exceptionally well acted mash-up of an alarming ABC After School Special and a feel-good Hallmark movie.) Calling out any of these moments might spoil them. (Also, they might not resonate with others the way they do with me.)
My husband loved the two simultaneous conversations (one between Crudup and Greer, the other between Blanchett and Fishburne) because we get two radically different perspectives of the same events. This scene is certainly informative and well acted (especially by Blanchett).
I think even better, I like a later scene when someone watches a bunch of critical (but withheld) exposition on Bernadette’s laptop. Not only do we learn so much here, but the character watching learns so much, too. Megan Mullally gets to deliver most of the best lines in this scene. (I actually like all of the parceled out exposition delivered on the laptop. It’s quite interesting to see the architectural genius of the genius architect. I wish we got a bit more of that, but I suppose that’s the point of the movie.)
Best Action Sequence:
I love the “rescue mission” scene picking Bee up from school, mostly because what is going on inside the car is so radically different than the drama unfolding outside the car.
Probably best is the big confrontation with Audrey in front of the houses while Bee is in the car. Blanchett, Wiig, and Nelson are all amazing in this scene, and it lays some of the groundwork for a later scene between Wiig and Blanchett that is also simply amazing.
The Negatives:
I would not call Where’d You Go, Bernadette? a misfire by Richard Linklater. (I keep seeing it called that, but I don’t know why! (Honestly, I liked it better than Dazed and Confused and Boyhood. Once I finish writing this, I plan to go read all the reviews and audience comments I can.)
I loved this film. (For reference, my favorite of his films is Bernie, a movie my husband and I have been unable to make others love as much as we do, though critics did mostly like that one.)
I would watch this again, and I actually found it far more entertaining than Blue Jasmine (which is also an excellent film).
Now I’ll admit that the ending is a bit problematic in that it seems to suggest an alternative to getting treatment for mental illness is just going to live at the South Pole. (I really can’t image my psychiatrist suggesting to me, “Hey! Instead of managing your bipolar disorder with medication, maybe you should try moving to one of the poles, and then that way, it will always be daylight, so when you’re awake for a week at a time–bonus!”) If you were a rhetoric teacher trying to make a class understand false dilemma fallacies, you could put together so many awesome lesson plans incorporating this movie.
Although the film beautifully showcases the mother-daughter bond, shows the value of human connection, and highlights the importance of letting artists create, it never really addresses the fact that Bernadette has some very serious psychiatric problems, and her plan is obviously to ignore and accommodate her issues (through rather extraordinary measures) rather than addressing and resolving them. Of course, if you had as much money and as much recognized talent as Bernadette, you could probably fix quite a bit by her methods. (If your issues can always be accommodated, why should you take drugs? The side effects are real.)
But I do think some of Bernadette’s most alarming problems are figments of her detached husband’s imagination. I would say more about steps for improvement that are intended, but I don’t want to spoil the ending of the movie.
The beginning of the movie is muddled, but so is Bernadette, so I assume the intention is to mirror her interior state. I loved this aspect, actually, because I find it so immersive. We’re in the weeds along with Bernadette. We learn what her world is like from the inside.
Now maybe a movie about an architect should incorporate more architecture. But this is a movie about an architect who is no longer working, so I don’t know.
The last act of the movie is a radical departure from what has come before in many ways, and I suppose that’s jarring. But I loved Blanchett’s performance so much, that I simply didn’t care.
If you’d like to get an earful of what’s wrong with Bernadette, I’m sure plenty of people will be happy to tell you, but I’m the wrong person to ask. I loved the movie. It really spoke to me.
Overall:
I had to hunt all over town to find Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, but the quest was worth it. Thanks to an amazing lead performance by Cate Blanchett and moving supporting work by the young actress playing her daughter, the film is so moving and rewarding. It’s a film celebrating human connection. I think it’s great.
