Brilliant, troubled architect becomes a bit of a bore
More so than most filmmakers who treat their characters like human beings, rather than cardboard plot inhabitants, the writer-director Richard Linklater intuits his way into finding the right tone, or mixture of tones, for whatever story he’s telling.
His good and great work has come from all over the place: science fiction novels (“A Scanner Darkly”), young-adult historical fiction (“Me and Orson Welles”), memories of Texas childhood, teen years, college and truecrime sagas (“Dazed and Confused,” “Boyhood,” “Everybody Wants Some!!”, “Bernie”). Spanning 18 years of real time, his “Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight” reminded audiences audiences before and during the age of perpetual digital agitation: Talking things through, without screens and with verifiable eye contact, usually gets you somewhere.
At his best Linklater does the same thing. He makes eye contact with the people in his movies.
Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he doesn’t. And sometimes he lands in a vexing middle ground, as with his latest film, an adaptation co-written with Holly Gent and Vince Palmo of the 2012 Maria Semple novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.”
Narrated by 15-year-old Bee Branch, Semple’s epistolary comedy conveys its story of Bee; her brilliant, devoted ex-architect mother, Bernadette; and Microsoft visionary father, Elgin, by way of emails, FBI missives and other correspondence. Once in the architectural vanguard, now semi-disgraced (for reasons eventually revealed) and socially phobic in a quippy, nattering way, Bernadette has subcontracted a good portion of her life to an unseen “virtual assistant” somewhere overseas. The weight of that misjudgment eventually leads to the disappearance of the title. Bee pieces together the paper trail that leads her, and her father, to Bernadette’s life-changing whereabouts.
The movie feels a little off from the beginning. The dialogue works less effectively as dialogue, rather than dialogue quoted in various correspondence. It’s arch without being especially witty.
The primary mixed blessing in “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” turns out to be a first-rate actress. Cate Blanchett is a supreme technician, inarguably versatile and never less than compelling. Yet her characterization of Bernadette feels a mite strenuous — stagy, in the wrong way, as opposed to film-y in the right, Linklater way. Meantime the director goes at the social satire with a bludgeon, not a rapier, so that the insufferably progressive liberal smugness, embodied in the Seattle private school Bee attends, grows tiresome. The broader comedy (a Bernadette-caused mudslide ruins a school fundraiser hosted by Kristen Wiig’s snippy fellow school parent) comes off uncertainly as well.
It’s a morose screwball comedy with heart, and right there that’s three elements going in related but separate directions. The supporting cast provides some ballast, thanks to Billy Crudup’s low-keyed Elgin; Laurence Fishburne as Bernadette’s old mentor; and, among others, Troian Bellisario (“Pretty Little Liars”) as Becky, Bernadette’s Antarctica confidante and life coach.
As Bee, the young actress Emma Nelson makes a self-effacing, subtly impressive feature film debut. The character’s almost humanoid in her unflappability; Nelson, guided by Linklater, takes the “-oid” out of the equation, when and where she can.