What to make of ‘Where’d You Go’

LOS ANGELES – What, exactly, are we to make of Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett), the dysfunctional slacker architect with the racing tongue and the porcupine disposition who’s at the center of Richard Linklater’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette”?

Bernadette lives in a beautiful crumbling mansion, perched on a Seattle hilltop, that she spends her days indolently renovating. Everywhere in the house, there are signs of her visual imagination (printed pamphlets folded into cones and stacked as wallpaper; splashes of surreal color). But it’s clear that the project stalled a long time ago, because the place is a half-finished wreck, with chipped paint and scarred moldings and barely furnished rooms.

What does Bernadatte do? Basically, she does nothing at all, except talk a blue streak of manic invective. She’s a dropdead misanthrope who spends all day, every day, putting down everybody and everything. She hates the neighbors. She hates the mothers at her daughter’s school. She hates the architecture of Seattle. (Seattle? It’s lucky she doesn’t live in Cleveland or Memphis.) She hates it all because she thinks she’s above it all.

There’s a place in movies for characters who are grandiose spewing narcissists, like Richard E. Grant’s counter culture-rotter in “With nail & I” or Meryl Streep’s witty control freak of a druggie showbiz daughter in “Postcards from the Edge.” Even when the things they say are “unreasonable,” they can speak for us. They blurt out the thoughts we don’t dare to, and that makes them, in movie terms, redemptive smart-mouth punks.

Blanchett certainly plays Bernadette that way -- as a worldclass hellion and pill-popping insomniac whose lack of a filter renders her a kind of scandalous truth-teller. The actress, in bobbed hair and (often) a pair of sunglasses that give her an aura of Anna Wintour hauteur, is in full command, snapping out her lines as if she were Dorothy Parker reborn as a mad housewife.

Yet the character, as the film presents her, is preaching from an awfully high-and-mighty pulpit. When she snarls at her next-door neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who’s a perilously” progressive” social climber, the words sting, and should, but too much of the time Bernadette tosses her darts with undiscriminating hostility.

She’s so reflexively intolerant and superior that when she’s approached at the Seattle Public Library by a young woman who’s a fan of hers, and she swats the admirer away like a mosquito, it’s not like we’re moved to say, “Good one!” She’s also not above sneaky acts of destruction, like agreeing to remove the blackberry vines from the edge of her property, but only because she knows the brick facade that borders Audrey’s yard may then come sliding down. (It does, with disastrous results.)

Bernadette’s husband, Elgin Branch (Billy Crud up), known as LG, is a major player at Microsoft, which means, of course, that their family is wealthy; they’re part of the Pacific Northwest tech boom of the ‘90s. LG is a warm and strong and loving dude, eternally supportive of Bernadette, though we hear occasional murmurings at home about the fact that he works long hours. (You want to say to the complainers: Welcome to this thing called the 21st century!) Bernadette’s daughter, Bee (played by the sparkling newcomer Emma Nelson), is also nice, with an avid independent streak, though thankfully, and maybe a bit unrealistically, she’s inherited very little of her mother’s acid putdown quality.