REVIEW: ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ should have started from scratch
Cate Blanchett stars as Bernadette Fox in Where’d You Go, Bernadette, directed by Richard Linklater.
Editing is one of those intangible yet essential parts of filmmaking; as the age-old maxim goes, it can be hard to point out good editing, but bad editing sticks out like a John Travolta hairstyle. And don’t forget the movies in between. Sometimes a movie seems to drag for reasons that are hard to identify, but editing is often the culprit - especially if the movie has a post-production history like Richard Linklater’s new release, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
The movie started its road to the big screen in 2013, as an adaptation of Maria Semple’s 2012 novel. Production took four years to get under way, and even after the film was in the can, it shifted its release date four times - a classic sign that the producers and distributors have less-than-stellar confidence in their final product. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that in between those date adjustments, the movie underwent some re-jigging in an effort to “save” it, though it probably made existing problems worse.
What we get is an assembly of scenes, many of which might work perfectly fine as shorts or even 30-minute TV episodes, but nothing resembling a satisfying feature-length arc. Bafflingly, the question posed by the film’s title doesn’t really come into force until halfway through. And various storytelling devices intended to tame the movie’s shaggy bits, like voiceover by the protagonist’s daughter and flashback exposition-dumps, are too inconsistently applied to keep anything in check.
The other barrier to the movie coming together are the specifics of the plot. The film follows its titular character, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett), a one-time star architect living in Seattle with her husband Elgie (Billy Crudup), a genius software engineer, and daughter Bee (Emma Nelson). Bernadette is stuck in an apparent two-decade creative slump, brought on by a failed project in Los Angeles and several miscarriages before giving birth to Bee. Bernadette is super-intelligent but prone to crippling anxiety and a distrust of other people. Her anti-social tendencies are particularly aimed at a group of helicopter mothers at her daughter’s elite school, headed up by Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who wants to be seen as the most well-connected and supportive parent of all.
Emma Nelson as Bernadette’s precocious daughter, Bee.
Bernadette’s struggle to fit in, but also stay away from society, builds to a crescendo when Bee asks her parents to book a family vacation to Antarctica to celebrate her perfect grades. Overwhelmed by the trip planning and her other preoccupations, Bernadette’s behaviour towards her neighbours and her reliance on a fraudulent virtual assistant service leads her husband to seek professional help for her, prompting Bernadette to run away from home and sending her family on a journey to track her down.
If that synopsis sounds like a cascade of details without a clear inciting incident, you’d be correct. The movie spends so much time layering all these components on top of each other that it seems to forget to sit back and see how they connect. The movie gets stuck in a rhythm of setting itself up, without really getting itself going. You could read this as an attempt to reflect Bernadette’s mind, firing on all cylinders as she tries to stay on top of the pressures she imposes on herself. But there’s not enough evidence of visual or sonic clues to support this reading, so it’s likely a byproduct of over-editing.
Then there’s the relatability of the characters. At the risk of sounding like I’m knocking wealthy people, it’s difficult to sympathize with Bernadette or her family when most of their problems are so simply resolved with money. The kid wants a trip to one of the most expensive destinations on Earth? Whip out the credit card! A (not-so-accidental) landslide wrecks a neighbour’s home? Write a cheque! In a better-constructed story, this feeling of disconnection wouldn’t happen: we would see how Elgie and Bernadette came by their money through genuine talent, and how they use their wealth responsibly. Instead, the trials and tribulations in the movie are so much easier to write off as “white people’s problems”.
Billy Crudup as Bernadette’s husband, Elgie.
The screenwriters also waffle on who the protagonist of the movie really is. As the movie opens, voiceover from Bee suggests that the story will be told from her perspective, as she reflects on what she knows about her mother and how her family came to be where it is. But then whole sections of the movie switch over to Bernadette’s point of view, which is great for revelling in another engaging Blanchett performance, but not so great for narrative consistency.
When Bee does pop up elsewhere in the film, she ends up oscillating between very different traits: pure-hearted and supportive one moment, snappy and critical the next. Or worse yet: she takes on the classic role of “insufferably precocious stand-in for the screenwriter”, which can sometimes infect intellectual mid-budget movies for adults.
As much as I love Linklater’s movies (the Before trilogy and Boyhood will probably always be on my top 100), nearly every filmmaker has a bad release here and there. Bernadette feels like a story Linklater and his team just couldn’t crack, the result of many valiant behind-the-scenes efforts and a typically great lead performance that just didn’t get the traction it needed.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Something tells me you could exchange Antarctica in this movie for any hard-to-reach, exotic locale.
The de-aging and face-replacement effects in the flashbacks are kind of off-putting.
It’s kind of amazing the family doesn’t get caught a lot sooner when they escape the cruise ships in the final act.