Where’d
You Go,
Bernadette
BY MICHAEL KORESKYDirector: Richard Linklater
Country/Distributor:USA, Annapurna
Opening:August 16O
ne could say that any serious
work of cinema, theater, literature,
music, painting, photography, or
critical writing is in essence an unspoken
search for meaning; Richard Linklater’s
oeuvre has been explicit in dramatizing
these aims. The writer-director may have
shifted to a more mainstream narrative
register over the years, but the ethos he
espoused in such epochal, millennium-
adjacent works asSlacker, Before Sunrise,
andWaking Life—in which his characters
wandered as they wondered about the
point of it all—has remained detectable
throughout. In his early thirties, BeforeSunset’s Jesse (Ethan Hawke) was already
feeling existential about aging, musing to
his partner in pontification, Celine, about
what matters in the ever-spectacular now:
“This is it! This is actually happening. What
do you think is interesting? What do you
think is funny? What do you think is
important? You know, every day is our last.”
In his latest film, Linklater confronts the
gap between youthful expectation and the
specter of failure. As the wayward title
character in Where’d You Go, Bernadette,
based on the 2012 novel by Maria Semple,
Cate Blanchett might as well be playing
one of the questing teen philosophers from
Linklater’s early films, all grown up and
chafing at the bonds of an unwanted
domestic life. Bernadette Fox is lost, but
she was never a slacker. Trapped in a suffo-
cating bourgeois box that is partly of her
own making, Bernadette at first appears
to be an idle neurotic, an intelligent
woman full of promise made invisible,
even deranged, by economic or prejudicial
circumstance (a Blanchett specialty, seen to
varying degrees in Blue Jasmineand Carol).
Bernadette is living unhappily in a leaky,
labyrinthine house of nooks, crannies, andarchitectural irregularities in the remote
hills of Seattle with her driven, emotionally
lucid daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and
geekily opaque husband Elgin Branch
(Billy Crudup), a tech research bigwig
whose computer animation program was
bought by Microsoft, necessitating the
family’s move to the Pacific Northwest.
Intensely disliked by many acquain-
tances, including soccer-mom neighbor
Audrey (a nuanced Kristen Wiig, never set-
tling for stereotype), with whom she has an
ongoing feud over encroaching blackberry
bushes, and her husband’s icy coworker
Soo-Lin (Zoë Chao), Bernadette is some-
thing of a proud pariah among the city’s
moneyed class (“the gnats,” as she calls
them). Everything is worrisome in her life,
and Linklater masterfully (perhaps to some,
frustratingly) plunks the viewer down in the
middle of an off-kilter interior world with-
out much context. Plagued by insomnia,
agoraphobia, and social anxiety, and
gifted with a brain that seems to run miles
faster than even her motormouth can
keep up with, Bernadette appears always
uncomfortable in her skin and surround-
ings. “I want you to know how hard it is68 | FILMCOMMENT|July-August 2019THE BIG SCREEN
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