Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a deeply old-fashioned movie. It isn’t woke AT ALL, but I was still attracted to it based on the previews. It is a complete fantasy of a life in which you can put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist and pretend that you are an appreciated genius who faces a monumental setback so you have the money and resources to just remove yourself from the world and can rely on people who love you unconditionally. Then when you’re ready to emerge, there are rewarding opportunities that will feed your mind, body and soul, and the world is not such an unwelcoming, annoying and scary place as you felt it was. Isn’t that a nicer fantasy than the reality which would probably be rage quitting your job, losing everything and everyone, then desperately trying to find another way to earn money, but somehow the only options are even more demeaning and inadequate than the job that you rage quit because you’re actually not special or talented.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is apparently an adaptation based on a book that I have not read, but I may skip the book because I’ve learned that it is told from the child’s point of view, and I was only there for the titular character, whom Cate Blanchett plays magnificently, possibly doing her best impression of Anna Wintour if Blanchett and not Meryl Streep starred in The Devil Wears Prada’s sequel after the editor decided to retire with a dash of the speaking style of an actor from Classic Hollywood. If you can’t tell by my description of her character, I loved her in spite of her flaws, her and her family’s (unrealistic) privilege and the entire family’s obliviousness to it and sense of entitlement with little to no consequences. (Also she is slightly racist.)
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is about a great architect who stopped designing in her prime, had a baby, but now her baby is on the threshold of high school, and she is a ball of issues barely embracing her Grey Gardens phase. Her poor neighbor, played by Kristen Wiig, is experiencing all the negative side effects of Bernadette’s issues, and her husband has no idea how to address the situation. Bernadette is aware of her issues, but maybe not the magnitude or the real impact on others. She sees others’ negative feedback as a response to her as a person, not as a rational response to her actions. She is simultaneously completely confident in herself and a loser, “failure’s got its teeth in me.”
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is the best when compared with other movies like Tully or Kelly & Cal, mothers who unexpectedly lose their minds and themselves in their seemingly innocuous attempt to create life, but what attracts me to Bernadette is the image of the anti-social, gifted woman, who experiences less social forgiveness than her male counterpart. Tully and Kelly were cool women who signed up for suburbia. Bernadette was talented, never cool. I’d classify Where’d You Go, Bernadette? with a movie like Family (2018), which also pairs a socially challenged career woman with a pre-adolescent, teenage girl, but instead of mother and daughter, it is aunt and niece. A pre-adolescent, teenage girl hasn’t been completely socialized to discard the parts of herself that does not fit society’s image of a what a young lady or a woman should be so she is still fiercely herself, and these older women find a kinship with these kids that they can’t experience with contemporary women who know how to fit in or at least appear to. In Family, the protagonist is painfully aware of her shortcomings and over the course of the movie, makes minor adjustments while still being a hot mess, but a hot mess that is trying.
If Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has a fatal flaw, it is that it is too afraid to really confront the negative side of Bernadette’s psychology. Hollywood movies (and even though I saw it in the artsy fartsy theater, it was definitely a mainstream film) are terrified of a character that genuinely needs therapy or has some sort of undiagnosed, mental disorder, accepts it without the movie suddenly transforming into a serious, grim movie. It is a fact that is entertained, but dismissed as deftly as possible. To this movie’s credit, the movie shows how it is a reasonable response, not misogyny, to try and get expert, medical intervention, but it leaps to the most extreme conclusions and proposed solutions about her possible diagnosis because the gut reaction to the mental health field is negative and suspicious. In real life, someone could be literally a physical danger to herself and others, and there still may not be any intervention. The movie proposes that the only solution to Bernadette’s issues is an outlet for her creativity, but that minimizes some real phobias and traumatic experiences, which are only be quieted by being busy, not resolved.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a Richard Linklater movie even though it does not feel like it though I suppose that explains the movie’s unwavering allegiance to genius and an intellectual life and the fact that it reserves its gleeful torture of the character that tries to fit the paradigm of the perfect, progressive mother. My favorite Linklater films are Bernie, Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Fast Food Nation, School of Rock and Waking Life, but this film does not feel like one of his films except for the YouTube fake documentary within the movie, which I adored. It is a perfect homage to a type of documentary that we’re accustomed to watching so it evokes an umami familiar pleasure. I was disappointed that we didn’t get more scenes of the characters from that fake documentary appear in Bernadette’s life because then the movie gives us an opportunity to compare and contrast the healthy with the unhealthy Bernadette without any of the cheap warring mother, neighbor tropes that they resolve in a hasty, not quite believable way. Plus the actors playing the documentary characters are terrific: Megan Mullally, Steve Zahn and Laurence Fishburne.
I have to take points off from Where’d You Go, Bernadette? for failing to nail the majesty and awe of nature. The Antarctica scenes felt flat, fake and ordinary, not inspiring and breathtaking. If you can stay home and watch television shows nail the scope of neighbor, filmmakers need to step their game up. Also I hate the How We Got Here trope because it sucked the mystery out of the movie. Instead of reaching a crescendo of confusion and wondering how Bernadette will react to being cornered, we know exactly how she’ll respond. The parts about Bernadette’s portrait that were unexpected and dynamic is how she suddenly goes from a person who is paralyzed by life to someone who springs into action like a lazy snake suddenly striking. The movie robbed us of experiencing one of those moments.
I really enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It reminded me of the kind of movie that I watched and related to when I did not have any movies that had protagonists that matched me demographically so I had to make do by stepping into the shoes of someone that was not originally made for me.
