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Richard Brody blogs about movies.Linklater was the wrong person to bring
it to the screen, yet here’s the thing:
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” has to be
seen, and demands to be believed, be-
cause of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jas-
mine” (2013), which earned her a second
Oscar, this new film lies at her command.
The most potent sequence, to my eyes,
is the plainest. In a Seattle café, Berna-
dette bumps into a former colleague, Paul
Jellinek (Laurence Fishburne), whom
she hasn’t seen for twenty-one years.
When he inquires what she’s been up to,
she goes into motormouth mode. You
can almost hear the revving of her brain,
and, better still, you can watch Paul
watching her. The art of listening is the
most delicate of the dramatic arts, ignored
at one’s peril; Alec Guinness, rehearsing
“Henry V” onstage, in his youth, was
once chided by the older actor who played
the King. “You just stand there looking
at me. Don’t just look. Listen. Listen,”
he said. Guinness never forgot that rep-
rimand, and I thought of him during
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” as Fish-
burne, one of the finest listeners in the
business, registers every syllable that flows
from Blanchett’s lips. At the end, he waits
a beat, and asks, “You done?”
The solution to her misery, according
to Paul, is clear. The reclusive architect
should get off her hermit ass and build.
“People like you must create,” he says. I
have my doubts about such advice—are
creative beings truly a race apart, with
special privileges?—but, for narrative pur-
poses, it makes solid sense. Elgie, mean-
while, hatches a more drastic plan for his
wife, arranging a psychological interven-
tion, with the aid of a sympathetic shrink
( Judy Greer). “We’d like to present to
you the reality of your situation,” they
announce to Bernadette. Not only, it turns
out, has she been hoarding her prescrip-
tion meds in a jar, like jelly beans, but, to
add to the bedlam, she may also be the
victim of identity theft.
For Bernadette, of course, and for us,
in the audience, the joke is not that her
identity’s been stolen but that she has
way too much of it. Just as the unstable
hillside of her property slides down one
day and floods the house next door with
mud, so her self overflows the bounds
of her regular life. That is why Blan-
chett’s performance, like that of Katha-
rine Hepburn, in “Bringing Up Baby”
(1938), treads so joyfully close to excess—
never quite over the top, yet savoring the
pleasures of the brink. What these ac-
tresses offer is a kind of ecstatic warning:
as your taste for experience grows avid
and unconstrained, and as your laughter
peals like a bell, people will fall in love
with you, then fear you, and eventually
find you mad.T
ime and again, during Gene Stup-
nitsky’s “Good Boys,” I asked my-
self what Richard Linklater would have
done with it. Being the guy who gave
us “School of Rock” (2003) and “Boy-
hood” (2014), Linklater is wise to the
apprehensions that seize the young,
as they approach one threshold after
another, and the three protagonists of
“Good Boys” are faced with the most
daunting threshold of all: a kissing party.
Spin the bottle, and get ready to mash
faces with the kid to whom it points.
What happens, though, if you don’t
know how to kiss? Won’t that be hell?
Max ( Jacob Tremblay), Lucas
(Keith L. Williams), and Thor (Brady
Noon) are twelve years old, and insep-arable—that is to say, unable to imag-
ine when or why their friendship could
ever end. They recently started sixth
grade, with its solemn rites of passage;
the matter of how many sips of beer a
boy can take, for example, is treated as
reverently as an Arthurian quest. It’s the
looming smooch, however, that baffles
Max, and so, seeking inspiration (and
maybe a demonstration), he borrows his
dad’s drone and flies it over the house
next door. “My neighbor’s a total nym-
phomaniac,” he explains. Lucas is per-
plexed. “She starts fires?” he says.
We get a handful of these malaprop-
isms, the most touching of which is Thor’s
plaintive cry: “Two weeks into sixth grade,
and I’m already a social piranha.” But the
team behind the movie, with Seth Rogen
and Evan Goldberg among the produc-
ers, is pretty much the gang responsible
for “Superbad” (2007) and “Sausage Party”
(2016), and, by my calculation, their com-
bined sense of humor is twice as juvenile
as that of Max and his pals. How funny
is it, say, to have the lads lark around with
sex toys, under the impression that they’re
merely normal toys? Is there not some-
thing suspect in the adult urge to get
one’s kicks from innocence? On the other
hand, “Good Boys” is worth catching for
those rare and wrenching points at which
emotional honesty breaks through. Any
viewer who is the product of a ruptured
marriage will grimace in the dark as Lucas,
whose favorite things include “rules, anti-
drug programs, and grilled cheese,” qui-
etly informs the others that his parents
are getting a divorce. Back comes the in-
stant reply: “What’d you do?” THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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