Aimless ‘Bernadette’ should just go away
Why’d you make this movie? Award-winning writer-director Richard Linklater’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” based on the 2012 epistolary novel by Maria Semple that spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list, is dead on arrival.
The film tells the at-first Seattle-set story of famed, agoraphobic architect Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett), who goes missing just before a planned family trip to Antarctica that Bernadette and her Steve Jobslike husband, Elgie Branch (Billy Crudup), promise to their prep-school age daughter Bee (Emma Nelson), if she can turn in a perfect report card. Bernadette and Elgie want Bee to attend the elite New England boarding school Choate. She is not so sure.
At first, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” seems like some snobby adult version of “Mean Girls” with housebound mother Bernadette banging heads with two other neighborhood mean moms. One of these, Audrey (Kristin Wiig), lives next door to Bernadette, Elgin and Bee and blames Bernadette for running over her foot at school
(she did not) and flooding her house with mud from her garden (she did). Why I should care in the least about any of this or any of these people I have no idea.
Bernadette, we learn, was a star architect and recipient of a MacArthur Grant. She created an award-winning residence named 20 Mile House because all of its parts were sourced from within 20 miles of its location. Unbeknownst to her, a superrich lout buys the place only to knock it down and put up a hideous mansion. I think we are supposed to believe that this broke Bernadette in some way and explains why she gives up her profession and moves to Seattle, where she and the family reside in a leaky former church (symbolic, you say?).
In another development, Bernadette uses an online personal assistant named Manjuly, who turns out to be a front for the Russian mob and a scheme to rob her and her husband’s bank accounts. Enter the FBI.
For some reason, we are reminded of the several visions of St. Bernadette of Lourdes. I have no idea if the film version, which was scripted by Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Before Midnight,” “A Scanner Darkly”) and writing partners Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. (“Me and Orson Welles”), is different from the book, which I have not read.
The characters in “Where’d You go, Bernadette” do not make much of an impression. When the film takes that trip to Antarctica, the scenery is certainly spectacular. But the thin storyline and the “then this happens” nature of the plot still makes the film a chore to sit through. Academy Award winner Blanchett (“Blue Jasmine”) makes Bernadette the Blanche DuBois of genius architects. In the supporting cast, Laurence Fishburne and Judy Greer do their best to pretend like something is happening. It isn’t.
(“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” contains profanity and drug use.)