92 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
Cate Blanchett plays a mysterious, troubled woman in Richard Linklater’s film.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
TESTING THE LIMITS
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” and “Good Boys.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY NHUNG LÊ
I
n 2005, the Academy Award for Best
Performance by an Actress in a Sup-
porting Role—what a mouthful—went
to Cate Blanchett, for playing Katharine
Hepburn in “The Aviator,” opposite
Leonardo DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes.
“Aren’t we a fine pair of misfits?” Hep-
burn asks him, more amused than rat-
tled by his wealth, and casually trounc-
ing him at golf. What defeats Hughes
is not her short game so much as the
fade of her long and lofted vowels. As
you’d expect, these are feigned to perfec-
tion by Blanchett, though the film doesn’t
allow her portrayal of Hepburn to be
much more than a star turn, and we are
left wondering: Could Blanchett con-
jure up the spirit of her predecessor—
that earthy air, both queenly and puck-
ish—without recourse to impersonation?
The answer is yes, and the proof is
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” which
is directed by Richard Linklater, adapted
from the novel by Maria Semple, and
set in the present day. Blanchett takes
the part of Bernadette Fox, who lives
with her husband, Elgie Branch (Billy
Crudup), their teen-age daughter, Bee
(Emma Nelson), and a golden retriever
named Ice Cream. Bernadette has crisply
cut dark hair, a smile loaded with mis-
chief, and a Garbo-like penchant for
shades—though not to ward off the sun,
because she lives in Seattle, or to deter
the inquisitive, because she’s not (as far
as we can tell) a celebrity. So what does
she need to hide? A roll call of her faults,
which include impatience, discourtesy,
and a temper as short as a butt end, sug-
gests a bit of a monster, yet our gaze is
trapped and held by her every move,
and, whatever may be raging within
her, it isn’t rage. “You’ve got fires banked
down in you,” James Stewart famously
said to Hepburn, in “The Philadelphia
Story” (1940), and that’s how we feel
about Bernadette, though Elgie is rather
less awed. “Stop turning everything into
a joke,” he says. “Why can’t you get along
with anyone?”
Because she isn’t just anyone, that’s
why. Little by little, we become aware
that our heroine was once a figure of
note. Long ago, she was a much lauded
architect, and we hear from a few of
her peers, who testify to the flair of
her innovations. But some calamity
struck, Bernadette renounced her call-
ing, and she and the family now inhabit
a hefty old wreck of a house on a hill.
Water drips, creepers writhe beneath
the rug, and, I for one, was hoping to
see a ghost. (To some extent, my wish
is granted: Bernadette, hounded by in-
somnia, prowls around by night.) The
mansion comes across as a theatre of
organic decay, in deliberate contrast to
Elgie’s office environment. He works at
Microsoft, developing Samantha 2, an
adhesive patch that, once stuck to your
brow, relays your thoughts onscreen. I
was waiting for the patch to join the
plot, spilling secret truths at tricky mo-
ments, but, for some reason, Samantha 2
keeps shtum.
Nobody else displays the same dis-
cretion. “Where’d You Go, Bernadette”
is a gabfest, honoring the chatter of its
source. The book was a choppy read,
stuffed with e-mails, blog posts, and
other ephemera, and the film, likewise,
finds room for video clips, talking heads,
and messages dictated by a flustered
Bernadette to her all-purpose assistant,
based in India; Bee’s voice-over, pensive
but unnecessary, tops and tails the whole
thing. The flimsiest sections of the novel
were the swipes of social satire, aimed
at easy targets (how difficult is it, really,
to bring helicopter parents crashing
down?), and the movie follows suit. Kris-
ten Wiig does what she can with the
role of Audrey, the Branches’ neighbor,
who hires a “blackberry abatement spe-
cialist” to probe the undergrowth be-
tween their homes, and fights to main-
tain what she calls the “correctitude” of
the local school. “It’s a Kenyan pop song,”
she declares, heralding the tuneless yowls
of an all-white junior choir.
From “Slacker” (1990) onward, Link-
later has been at his most fruitful when
hanging out in his native Texas, so it’s
disorienting, to say the least, that his lat-
est film should begin at the bottom of
the world. The opening shot shows Ber-
nadette in a kayak, drifting amid the ice-
bergs of Antarctica, and the movie re-
turns there for its final act. We even get
a southbound chase, of sorts, the object
of which is to meld her family together
and, in the process, thaw the frosty hearts
of moviegoers. Some of these far-flung
scenes seem oddly muffled and rushed,
and fans of the book may worry that
