Where’d You Go, Bernadette

How’d You Get Gone, Girl?

Originally printed in Compass, August 21, 2019.

There’s a small subsection of YouTube videos that recut footage from typically grim or self-serious films into coming attraction trailers steeped in the qualities of a near opposite genre. As works of comedic bathos, they are a peek into an alternate world of American cinema. “Jaws” becomes a Rob Reiner-style romantic comedy between man and shark, while “The Shining,” through clever use of select dialog and Peter Gabriel’s enduringly upbeat “Solsbury Hill,” becomes the story of a father and son reconnecting. 

Richard Linklater’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is like someone recut David Fincher’s 2014 domestic thriller “Gone Girl” into a feel-good flick directed by…well, Richard Linklater.

Like Gone Girl’s Amazing Amy, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett) is also the vanished wife from a commercially successful 2012 New York Times Best Seller (“Bernadette” is adapted from Maria Semple’s farcical mystery novel.) They’re both Ivy League, East Coast intellectual types who resent their husbands for marooning them in a social wasteland free from employment, purpose or friends that match their own shrewd sophistication. Of course, Amy found herself in post-recession Missouri, whereas Bernadette lives in a mansion in an upscale cul-de-sac in suburban Seattle where she’s vexed by pesky mothers from her daughter’s tony middle school. They’ve both become a domestic shadow to their husbands’ careers: Amy’s husband runs the local watering hole, while Bernadette’s husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), gives TED Talks on behalf of his division of Microsoft, where he shows off mind-reading future tech that writes emails through telepathy. If Bernadette’s circumstances seem a bit more luxurious, remember she also gets to be Cate Blanchett, which is luxury not even Microsoft money can purchase.

In her effortfully effortless brown bob, patterned scarves, geometric sweaters and trench coats with cuffed sleeves, prickly Bernadette may stir up frustrated emotions from those around her — particularly those of a terrifically fragile Kristen Wiig as her PTA-obsessed neighbor — but Blanchett just looks so damn cozy and comfortable. Frustrated with his wife’s antics and agoraphobia-driven isolation, Elgin poses to a therapist that he’s not sure what a psychotic breakdown looks like. Apparently it looks a lot like the fall catalog from Everlane. 

Even at her low point Linklater and Blanchett keep things light for the character, and while hoarding prescription pills may spell out suicidal tendencies to the therapist, on Bernadette it’s just a public nap in a pharmacy so minimalist and beautifully lit it makes New York’s Zitomer look like a dive. Really, the nap was the drug store’s own fault. Do not put a tufted chaise lounge in the same place you hand out Xanax. 

Once Bernadette was a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant winning architect, but 20 years after failing to recover from a calamity in her career, she’s an aimless stay-at-home mother. She’s loving with her precocious daughter (Emma Nelson), spiteful toward everyone else, and despite her design talents and her husband’s salary, she’s left their ramshackle mansion in a state where she could hardly be surprised if the Maysles knocked on her door to film. She’s an insomniac, a contrarian, and the family’s upcoming trip to Antarctica has driven her to a paranoid mania. That her husband can develop mind-reading tech but can’t figure out where his wife’s life went wrong is an obvious metaphor. But on screen it’s all such easy viewing.

The descent of a visionary’s mind into a protective fog of depression, social cruelty and emotional secrecy should either spark more sincere insight or a darker, more exacting comedic hand — even as a story in the suburbs. Especially as a story in the suburbs. Though miscast, Blanchett is compulsively watchable. Her magnetism may be the film’s selling point, but she looks too luminous as she involuntarily starts crying in the car while singing to Cyndi Lauper with her daughter. I imagine the eighth-grader, seeing her mother’s sorrow suddenly jump out of her kooky, hazy charisma, had the same thought I did: “God, I want that sweater.”