Movie Review: 'Where'd You Go Bernadette'

Where'd You Go Bernadette? Antarctica. Bernadette went to Antarctica, it's literally in the trailer for the movie. I'm being obtuse and flippant, but Where'd You Go Bernadette inspires such flippancy. This paean to awful rich people without real problems flounders among a set of characters so unlikable or poorly realized that even the effervescent Cate Blanchett is taken down.

Bernadette Fox (Blanchett) was once a genius architect. Then, she married Elgin (Billy Crudup) and abandoned her career after a professional setback. The quitting of her career also coincided with the difficult birth of Bernadette and Elgin's only child, Bee (Emma Nelson), a child that Bernadette then dedicated her time to as a mother.

Elgin meanwhile, became a rising star at Microsoft, and the two bought a home in Seattle to be near Microsoft HQ, and so that Bernadette would have a project to work on while raising their daughter, the house was a rundown former school. Somehow, Bernadette never got interested in working on it, and the home has become a ramshackle visual testament to Bernadette's arrested development.

As we join the story, Bernadette is becoming further detached from the outside world. She refuses to engage with the neighbors, especially the neighborhood alpha-mom, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). And, Bernadette is becoming less and less likely to leave the house. With the help of a virtual assistant named Manjula, she really doesn't need to leave at all, and would not were it not for Bee's cajoling.

Audrey, meanwhile, is judgmental, bossy, and a gossip, but Bernadette isn't much better. Bernadette is weird, anti-social, and vindictive, and she's supposed to be the heroine of this story. Elgin, for his part, is aloof, self-centered, and a workaholic. His assistant, Soo-Lin (Zoe Chao), appears to want to sleep with him, and is also one of the neighbor mom's gossiping about Bernadette. This is one of many plots that is introduced and dismissed along the way in Where'd You Go Bernadette.

All in all, none of these characters are likable, which would be fine if they were unlikable with a purpose or a point of view. Instead, each of these characters is presented as a series of behaviors, rather than as believable human beings who might be interesting subjects for a movie. Loose assemblages of traits stand in for most of the movie, in place of actual characters.

Here is usually where I would use a transitional phrase such as 'this is where the plot kicks in', but there really isn't much of a plot to Where'd You Go Bernadette. For more than half of the movie we are stuck watching Bernadette be a flaky, unlikable weirdo, aside from a couple of charming mother-daughter scenes, and then she runs away in the latter portion of the second act.

Plot threads are introduced and dropped. One that I was sure was supposed to have a pay off was Bernadette's professional failure. Bernadette was in the midst of creating an innovative type of sustainable home when a hotshot TV producer moved in next door, and began to undo all of Bernadette's hard work. She ran away and the home was plowed under by the TV producer.

Someone, we never find out who, produced an entire documentary on Bernadette's innovative home that features interviews with Bernadette's former colleagues, including Steve Zahn, Megan Mullally, and Laurence Fishburne, and the sad fate of her project. Bernadette watches a few minutes of the documentary in the movie, as does her daughter, but it has no payoff.

Zahn and Mullally are never heard from in the movie outside of these brief, talking head interviews. The thread about the sustainable house, nicknamed the 20 mile house for its use of locally sourced materials, those only found within 20 miles of the home, never comes up again, and provides only the most minor insight about Bernadette's fragile genius.

I could go on about a few other dropped threads or unnecessary asides, but the biggest complaint I have with Where'd You Go Bernadette isn't related to the shoddy storytelling. The biggest problem of Where'd You Go Bernadette is that there are no real problems in the movie. Bernadette has trouble sleeping, and may or may not be depressed, but it's hard to sympathize with someone who could, at any moment, buy her way out of any problem.

The film establishes that everyone in the movie is ludicrously rich. Bernadette's biggest problem is that she lacks inspiration. Stop the presses, let's all pause to play the world's smallest violin for the super-rich lady who feels creatively blocked. Boy, can't we all relate to that problem, right? I mean, just the other day I was sitting in my multi-million dollar mansion desperately trying to decide what I wanted to create next and worried that inspiration would never strike.

What exactly is Where'd You Go Bernadette attempting to evoke in us as an audience? The film appears to want sympathy for Bernadette, but then she is such an insufferable flake, and a super-rich insufferable flake at that, that such sympathy is impossible. So what then? Did Director Richard Linklater really think we were going to identify with, or care about, any of these characters?

That's not to say that Cate Blanchett delivers an entirely bad performance as Bernadette, she's far too good for that. No, rather, the issues with Where'd You Go Bernadette come from the writing and direction of Richard Linklater. Blanchett is giving all she's got to make Bernadette a character, but you get the sense early on that she's at the mercy of Linklater and the book which he is quite poorly adapting.

From what I understand, the book version of Where'd You Got Bernadette actually makes Bernadette's whereabouts into a mystery, something for the story to build toward as a climax as opposed to the anti-climax of the movie, which gives away her whereabouts in the first few scenes. Most of the movie takes place in flashback after we first glimpse Bernadette in a kayak surrounded by the ice walls of Antarctica.

Without the mystery of Bernadette's whereabouts, the movie version of Where'd You Go Bernadette has no narrative force, there is nothing to drive the plot toward. Incidents take place, and reveal all of the characters, aside from the relatively innocent Bee, as obnoxious, self-involved jerks whose problems don't mean much to those of us who have actual problems.

Where'd You Go Bernadette is a baffling choice of material for the director of such thoughtful and intelligent movies as Boyhood or the Before franchise. Where'd You Go Bernadette is comically out of touch with any kind of recognizable reality or anything even remotely reminiscent of the kind of themes Linklater has passionately explored in the past.

If I had to guess what interested Linklater in Where'd You Go Bernadette, I would guess that he wanted to go to Antarctica. That's really the only point at which Where'd You Go Bernadette gains any steam. In the Antarctica-set third act we get some things actually at stake, we get some legitimate drama and character development, and at the very end, we've abandoned Bernadette entirely so that Linklater can marvel over a South Pole research station that is a real life architectural wonder.

Making a movie about these characters appears entirely incidental to Linklater's dilettante obsession with architecture. The writer-director appears to fancy the idea of trying on being an architect, and making a movie is secondary to the exploration of that unique brand of genius. That's actually an approach to a movie that could work, but unfortunately, Linklater is also trying to remain somewhat true to the book he is loosely and rather poorly adapting, and these two interests are at such odds that the movie suffers.