Linklater takes on novel adaptation

Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater returns with “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” |

My first impression of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the new film by Richard Linklater that opens Friday, was that it was a rare film by the Houston native that wasn’t defined by time.

So often in Linklater’s films, time is part of the story’s frame, with sorts of deadlines as in his three “Before” films: “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Before Midnight.” And then there’s “Boyhood,” which he shot for parts of 12 years. Even his baseball movie, “Everybody Wants Some!!,” and his Orson Welles movie, “Me and Orson Welles,” had deadlines that loomed over the story. “Bernadette” has no such time-related element in its actual structure.

But Linklater points out that “time is in fact a big character here.”

He brings up how time “transforms us, how it can slip away. Where did these two decades go?”

He’s talking about two decades in the life of Bernadette Fox, played by Cate Blanchett. The fictional character was a lauded, progressive architect, renowned internationally for her work. And then she dropped out of sight. Or, more specifically, she dropped out of sight within her profession as her family dynamic presented a gravitational pull that proved stronger than her work.

And so Bernadette begins this story coiled by years of jittery, anti-social hermetic existence.

“It’s very much a portrait of an artist,” Linklater says, “who’s not practicing their art, which is a little dangerous.”

ACTOR KRISTEN WIIG AND DIRECTOR RICHARD LINKLATER CONFER ON THE SET OF “WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE.” Wilson Webb / Annapurna Pictures