It's a dangerous business, dear reader, to expect something too specific from a movie. With a title like Where'd You Go, Bernadette, I was so sure this would be a delightful romp of a global mystery. A sort of spectacular fantasy mix of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Eat, Pray, Love that features a disappearing mother and her trail of clues for her daughter to follow, leading to a place of fulfillment and healing for both. And, in a way, that's what this movie is, except that it's completely tonally different, stretching out the melodrama while cutting the mystery woefully short.
Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) is a loner. Reclusive physically and emotionally, she hides in her large, somewhat unkempt house, only comfortable when she's working on some kind of project. We learn, after some time and an unwieldy (but quite funny) expository device, that Bernadette is a world-renowned architect. After a professional setback -- her environmentally-friendly magnus opus gets bulldozed by a competitor, provoked by Bernadette's pride -- she cuts herself off. She doesn't seem to be agoraphobic so much as misanthropic, deliberately making herself unlikable in her limited interactions with real people. Her disdain and eccentricities play off each other as she recedes into her own mind, going so far as to trusting even menial household chores to an Indian personal assistant named Manjula who actually lives in India.
It would all make for a fascinating character study and star vehicle for Blanchett if there wasn't a half-baked plot to go along with it all. Her daughter Bee, having received excellent grades, asks her parents to take her to Antarctica on a vacation. And this is where the film really threatened to derail for me (unfortunate, as this is the first scene) because it frames the whole thing immediately as rich people problems. How many kids are allowed "anything they want" as a result of getting good grades? And how many of them choose to go to Antarctica -- nearly impossible logistically, not to mention legally -- only to have their parents casually discuss it before acquiescing? It's a pretty tone-deaf approach to a story arguably about empowerment and fulfillment.
Bernadette's gauche social hostility gets her in trouble with her neighbors and her husband, but it also gets her into trouble with her audience. I think the blame here must go to director Richard Linklater, who doesn't seem able to bridge the gap between his protagonist's strangeness and her charm. He's out of his element here, playing off Bernadette's hilarious inability to function while showcasing her as a sassy elitist whose casual racism and brilliant neighborly antagonism are forgivable because of her supposed story arc. See, being a mother changes you, the movie seems to say. Bernadette gave up her artistic and professional passions for her family, which apparently has resulted in festering resentment and debilitating anxieties. So in order to reconnect with herself, she has to leave her family and go to the ends of the earth.
It's a weird piece, and one that could open up fascinating conversations about gender, wealth, and artistic integrity. But will it? I'd say not, as the generic film hardly brings enough attention to itself to warrant much discussion. It doesn't even feel like a Linklater film and has very little visual style except in the climactic "intervention" scene. That and the overused "Time After Time" song suggest to me that Linklater didn't really know what he himself wanted out of this movie. We're left with a mostly inaccessible story about privileged people behaving badly in a lackluster film that can't quite muster the courage to do what Bernadette did: something.
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