she has been on a 20-year hiatus from what
should have been a successful architecture
career—and being idle does not agree with
her. One of the central questions the film ex-
plores is, “What happens to the artist who is
no longer creating?” According to her former
colleague (Laurence Fishburne), Bernadette
is at risk of becoming “a menace to society.”
His advice? “Get your ass back to work.”B
ERNADETTE certainly has energy
to burn, energy that she primarily
channels into long-winded dia-
tribes against, among other things, Seattle’s
urban planning failures and what she finds
to be the grotesquely false pleasantriesof the other moms at Bee’s school, whom
she gleefully refers to as gnats. (She has
particular beef with her neighbor Audrey,
played by a fantastic Kristen Wiig, who has
been on her case to remove the blackberry
bushes she claims are encroaching on her
yard.) Bernadette also spends a great deal
of time anxiously pacing around her giant,
dilapidated house—a former Catholic girls
school replete with a confessional and
a fresco of the Virgin Mary—dictating tasks,
opinions, and anxieties to her personal as-
sistant, who is (allegedly) based in Delhi.
The main reason Bernadette doesn’t
want to go on the family trip to Antarctica:
“It would require me to be surrounded by66 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
School of Rock, and the war veteran drama
Last Flag Flying, to name a few. There’s noth-
ing, it seems, that he can’t do.
“I’m a simple-minded storyteller,” explains
Linklater over the phone. “I don’t really like
movies that have too much going on. I can
take things that are pretty complex and pare
them down into something I can under-
stand. That’s always been my gift,” he jokes,
“if I can understand it, anyone can.”
His ability to drill into the core of even
the most complicated story is precisely why
Annapurna Pictures founder Megan Ellison,
who worked with Linklater on 2016’s
Everybody Wants Some!!, approached him
to helm the project after a number of at-
tempts at getting it off the ground had fallen
flat. The epistolary structure of the book—
it’s presented as a compilation of emails,
memos, invoices, and receipts—coupled with
its enigmatic and cantankerous protago-
nist—made it a challenge to adapt.L
INKLATER enlisted collaborators
Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, who
also served as AD on the film, to co-
write the script. “In many ways the book is
an embarrassment of riches because there’s
so much to choose from,” says Gent. “It’s not
just characters speaking back and forth. It’s
a lot of information presented in different
ways, and not always reliably.”
While in the novel, the mystery of
Bernadette’s whereabouts is solved in retro-
spect by her teenaged daughter, Bee (played
with impressive depth by newcomer Emma
Nelson), in the movie the events leading up
to her disappearance unfold in real time.
“It was a huge storytelling decision
to make,” says Linklater. “To me, the point
was to give the audience a front row seat to
the conflict. The book withholds quite a bit
and Bernadette disappears from the reader—
as well as her family—for a long time.
I was like, ‘I don’t think the movie could do
without Cate for 35 or 40 whole minutes.’
I wanted to give Cate’s Bernadette the
benefit of the doubt, at least technically, so
we could see the ways the other characters
might misinterpret her behavior.”
Written with Blanchett already attached,
the actor had her work cut out for her
personifying Semple’s vitriolic protagonist
without completely alienating audiences
along the way. Aside from her husband Elgie
(Billy Crudup), a Microsoft big-shot and
TED Talk all-star, and their sweet, studi-
ous daughter Bee, Bernadette has actively
withdrawn from everyone and everything.
A recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant,