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A child changes everything, or so the familiar parenting adage tells us. For the main character in Richard Linklater ’s new film “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” becoming a parent not only changed her lifestyle; it seeped into her art, career and changed her as a person in the process. It’s a theme worth exploring deeply—especially as more women are sharing candid stories from the frontlines of motherhood—but unfortunately, it’s not given its proper due in the movie’s try-hard script. 

As pieced together from voiceover narration and an unbelievably high-quality video essay, Bernadette Fox ( Cate Blanchett ) was once a rising star in the architecture world. However, after one crushing professional setback and a fraught transition into motherhood, she retreated into the confines of a stately old mansion in Seattle with her husband Elgie ( Billy Crudup ) and their precocious daughter, Bee ( Emma Nelson ). When the now teenaged Bee asks her parents for a trip to Antartica, it sets off a panic in the agoraphobic recluse, causing an avalanche of problems that sends her off on a journey towards self-rediscovery—without her family knowing quite where she’s taken off to. 

Based on Maria Semple ’s book of the same title, the movie version of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” shifts the perspective of the story from Bee’s search for her runaway mom onto Bernadette’s shoulders. However, this character is not interested in making it easy for the audience to empathize with her. Linklater can’t seem to strike the right tone for Bernadette’s story, so in some moments, she’s comically ill-equipped to handle the slightest of domestic chores and foists a number of her personal tasks on an unseen digital assistant based in India. Then when her helplessness and anxiety are portrayed in a more tragic light, it leaves a guilty aftertaste for viewers who laughed at those earlier scenes. Add in Blanchett’s barbed performance as a woman on the edge of needing a mother’s little helper just to pick up her kid from school, and that’s yet another layer on the already conflicted movie. At times, Bernadette can be casually racist to her digital assistant and her holier-than-thou attitude towards just about everyone else feels less like a defense mechanism and more of a justification for treating others dreadfully. In her eyes, they don’t deserve better and that goes double for Bernadette’s arch-nemesis, her PTA-obsessed neighbor, Audrey ( Kristen Wiig ). It’s tiring keeping track of the movie’s number of mood swings. 

Perhaps inadvertently, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” also becomes a study of a difficult artist who hates just about everyone who isn’t her daughter. Almost everyone else in the movie tolerates her because she’s an avowed genius in her field. Others (sometimes rightfully) despise her because of her behavior. But will the pass for creative men with bad attitudes be offered to Bernadette as well? Usually, what endears these kinds of prickly antiheroes are some sense of pathos, something to connect with or feel for, but this movie doesn’t offer enough to explain or absolve Bernadette’s actions. By the time the credits roll to the well-worn tune of Cyndi Lauper ’s “Time After Time,” I’m not convinced Linklater knew where his movie should end or what he wanted to say by telling this story. 

Nor does there seem to be a clear visual style beyond constant grey and rainy skies hovering over the movie’s version of Seattle. It’s not that it’s terribly shot by cinematographer Shane F. Kelly , it’s that it’s so blandly competent, it barely feels like a Richard Linklater film. His movies tend to feel so much more empathetic towards their characters. From the blossoming romance between characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the “Before” trilogy, the rowdy college boys of “Everybody Wants Some!!” and even the unserious substitute teacher played by Jack Black in “ School of Rock ,” these worlds in these movies reflected the stories playing out on Linklater’s stages. That that connection is missing in “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” speaks to its discord. 

Perhaps its the present day fatigue that makes this movie about a wealthy white woman who abandons her family to find herself feel so terribly out-of-place. Bernadette lives in a very comfortable bubble: her family owns their home, she’s married to a supportive husband with a high salary job at a tech company (Microsoft, in case they don’t say it enough times in the script co-written by Linklater, Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr.). She doesn’t shut her daughter down when asked for a trip to Antartica, which no, most Americans would not be able to afford. The book is not yet a decade old and already it feels like the self-fulfillment worries of another lifetime. In this world, it seems only wealthy artists can afford the luxury to create, to run away from their family without warning, sweet talk their way into a fairly restricted part of the planet and claim it as something they needed to do for their genius work. It’s a privileged perspective with nothing to share for the rest of us.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to  RogerEbert.com .

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Rated PG-13

103 minutes

Cate Blanchett as Bernadette Fox

Emma Nelson as Bee Branch

Billy Crudup as Elgie Branch

Kristen Wiig as Audrey

Laurence Fishburne as Paul

Judy Greer as Dr. Kurtz

Claudia Doumit as Iris

Zoe Chao as Soo-Lin

Katelyn Statton as Vivian

Richard Robichaux as Floyd

• Richard Linklater
• Vincent Palmo Jr.
• Holly Gent Palmo
• Sandra Adair
• Maria Semple

Original Music Composer

• Graham Reynolds

Director of Photography

• Shane F. Kelly

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‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ Review: She’s Hiding From Herself

Cate Blanchett plays a woman in trouble in Richard Linklater’s latest, based on the best-selling novel by Maria Semple.

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By Manohla Dargis

The human dark cloud churning violently over “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” doesn’t much fit in anywhere, including in this comedy of crisis. That’s more or less intentional, but it presents a challenge for the director Richard Linklater, whose easygoing filmmaking style and vibe can feel out of sync with the gathering storm.

Cate Blanchett plays our cloud, a lapsed architect living unhappily, and volubly so, in Seattle. You might think the city’s brooding skies would please Bernadette; certainly they offset her clothing’s moody palette, her dark regrettable bob and the sunglasses she hides behind, Garbo-like . She looks like a film star at a junket hunting for an exit or someone in witness protection. She’s in seclusion, in a way, though it takes a while for the obvious to surface: Bernadette is hiding from herself.

The story doesn’t so much commence as sidle in with modest, loosely staged and played scenes filled with minor calamities and seemingly unfreighted exchanges . There’s a family, a dog, some neighbors, a car in the drive, the usual. Except that everything is a touch skewed, including the family’s house, a magnificently leaky sprawl that, like Bernadette, is a demanding presence in its own right. Like her, too, it telegraphs a specific, casual privilege, the kind where just-so peeling walls are meant to create visual interest, expressing a sensibility instead of an undone domestic chore.

It’s generally pleasant hanging out with Bernadette. Her husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup), is similarly nice to look at. ( He must be the handsomest genius at Microsoft.) He’s cool-uncool, at ease in the world yet removed from it. Linklater is good at quick introductions, and when you first see Elgie he’s leaning over his laptop in the kitchen, wearing a heart-rate monitor that Bernadette sharply plucks from the back as she swans by, like a high-school meanie snapping a bra. It happens fast — Elgie quickly stands up straight — and conveys something not yet identifiable about them.

Bernadette may be lovingly signaling Elgie to fix his posture or pay attention to the family; you could call her action mothering or policing, perhaps both. Whatever her motivation, the exact emotional coordinates of her relationship with Elgie remain unfocused. But the snap creates one of those tiny narrative signposts, the kind that make you note something seemingly minor — a sharp look, an outwardly random rebuke — and stash it away while you follow the story. It also works, just as Bernadette knew it would, because it pulls Elgie out of his head and back to the family, specifically their teenage daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson).

Bee wants to go on a family trip to Antarctica, a request that sets everything in motion. It’s a quirky ask that doesn’t fit Bee, a serious, otherwise bland girl whose only distinction is her love for her mother. But the trip gives the family and Linklater something to focus on because it unmoors Bernadette. A promisingly unlikable, supercilious woman — an all-too-rare cinematic protagonist — she spends most of her time doting on her daughter and fussing over a house that, with its incessant problems, including its metaphor-laden invasive and prickly blackberry bushes, has become her project, carapace and near-prison. Watching her rationalize a way out is amusing.

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'Bernadette' Is A Stirring Tribute To A Woman Rediscovering Her True Calling

Justin Chang

Cate Blanchett stars as Bernadette Fox, a once-legendary architect who hasn't built anything in decades, in Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Wilson Webb/Annapurna Pictures hide caption

Cate Blanchett stars as Bernadette Fox, a once-legendary architect who hasn't built anything in decades, in Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

The writer-director Richard Linklater has said that he cast Cate Blanchett in his new comedy, Where'd You Go, Bernadette , because, in his words, "only a genius can portray a genius believably."

Whether you agree with that or not, it's hard to deny that Blanchett was the right genius for the role of Bernadette Fox, the central character in this delightful and eccentric adaptation of Maria Semple 's 2012 novel . Notably, this is the first Linklater movie to feature a solo female lead, and Bernadette instantly emerges as one of the most vibrant and complex characters in the director's filmography.

Bernadette is a brilliant, legendary architect who once designed an eco-friendly modernist home built completely from materials sourced within a 20-mile radius. But that was two decades ago, before she hit a major slump, and she hasn't created anything since. Now she lives in Seattle, in an enormous ramshackle house with her husband, Elgie, and their teenage daughter, Bee.

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'bernadette' is a cautionary tale about putting creativity aside after kids.

Their life together seems chaotic but reasonably happy at first. Billy Crudup makes a nice voice of sanity as Elgie, a Microsoft tech visionary who helps keep his wife grounded. Bee, played by a winning newcomer named Emma Nelson, is plucky and smart, and she has managed to talk her parents into going on a family vacation to Antarctica before she departs for an elite boarding school.

But all is not well with Bernadette, who loves her family but can't stand anyone else. Sporting a brown bob, she likes to hide behind dark sunglasses and look the other way when she's approached by adoring fans or local busybodies — like her overbearing neighborhood nemesis, Audrey, played by a terrific Kristen Wiig .

In addition to her antisocial streak, Bernadette suffers severe anxiety attacks and may or may not be hooked on prescription meds. Blanchett gives a splendidly mercurial performance: At times Bernadette's nerves are so raw and exposed that she might remind you of the desperately neurotic widow the actress played — and won an Oscar for — in Blue Jasmine.

Searching For 'Bernadette' In The Wilds Of Seattle

The script, which Linklater wrote with Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., has a shambling but tightly plotted structure that keeps throwing you off-balance. Bernadette can be acerbic, tender, charming and maddening, sometimes all at once, and it's both funny and painful to watch Blanchett strip away the character's psychological defenses, layer by fragile layer.

As singular as Bernadette is, she feels distantly related to all the marginalized misfits and wayward souls Linklater has gravitated toward in movies as different as Slacker and School of Rock . The director also has an instinctive affection for artists, and you can feel his sympathy and his respect for Bernadette surging through every scene. She may be a misanthrope, but she's a misanthrope you can't help but love, whether she's launching into one anguished verbal aria after another or dictating lengthy, punctuation-free emails to her virtual personal assistant.

Some of those devices come straight from the novel, which was written in an epistolary format, its story pieced together from letters, emails and other documents. The movie is more conventionally constructed, and in some ways it feels like a lark for Linklater — a zippy, lightweight diversion compared with the more audacious dramatic experiments of Boyhood and the romantic trilogy that began with Before Sunrise . But in its own way, this story is also about the passage of time, the way life can thwart an artist's hopes and dreams.

The title of Where'd You Go, Bernadette asks what happened to the brilliant creative force Bernadette used to be. But it also takes on a more literal meaning when she escapes an intervention that her husband, concerned about her increasingly erratic behavior, has arranged. Bernadette goes on that trip to Antarctica by herself, and Elgie and Bee chase after her; much beautifully controlled chaos ensues. The third act sends the characters through a whirlwind of farcical twists and emotional reckonings, but it also becomes a genuinely stirring tribute to a woman rediscovering her true calling in the unlikeliest place imaginable. The gorgeous polar scenery becomes a chilly backdrop for one of the sweetest movie endings I've seen this year.

Film Review: Cate Blanchett in ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’

Cate Blanchett plays a blocked architect who lashes out at the world — or is it just at her own privilege? — in Richard Linklater's befuddling comedy.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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What, exactly, are we to make of Bernadette Fox ( Cate Blanchett ), the dysfunctional slacker architect with the racing tongue and the porcupine disposition who’s at the center of Richard Linklater ’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette”? Bernadette lives in a beautiful crumbling mansion, perched on a Seattle hilltop, that she spends her days indolently renovating. Everywhere in the house, there are signs of her visual imagination (printed pamphlets folded into cones and stacked as wallpaper; splashes of surreal color). But it’s clear that the project stalled a long time ago, because the place is a half-finished wreck, with chipped paint and scarred moldings and barely furnished rooms.

What does Bernadette do? Basically, she does nothing at all, except talk a blue streak of manic invective. She’s a drop-dead misanthrope who spends all day, every day, putting down everybody and everything. She hates the neighbors. She hates the mothers at her daughter’s school. She hates the architecture of Seattle. ( Seattle ? It’s lucky she doesn’t live in Cleveland or Memphis.) She hates it all because she thinks she’s above it all.

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There’s a place in movies for characters who are grandiose spewing narcissists, like Richard E. Grant’s counterculture rotter in “Withnail & I” or Meryl Streep’s witty control freak of a druggie showbiz daughter in “Postcards from the Edge.” Even when the things they say are “unreasonable,” they can speak for us. They blurt out the thoughts we don’t dare to, and that makes them, in movie terms, redemptive smart-mouth punks. Blanchett certainly plays Bernadette that way — as a world-class hellion and pill-popping insomniac whose lack of a filter renders her a kind of scandalous truth-teller. The actress, in bobbed hair and (often) a pair of sunglasses that give her an aura of Anna Wintour hauteur, is in full command, snapping out her lines as if she were Dorothy Parker reborn as a mad housewife.

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Yet the character, as the film presents her, is preaching from an awfully high-and-mighty pulpit. When she snarls at her next-door neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who’s a perilously “progressive” social climber, the words sting, and should, but too much of the time Bernadette tosses her darts with undiscriminating hostility. She’s so reflexively intolerant and superior that when she’s approached at the Seattle Public Library by a young woman who’s a fan of hers, and she swats the admirer away like a mosquito, it’s not like we’re moved to say, “Good one!” She’s also not above sneaky acts of destruction, like agreeing to remove the blackberry vines from the edge of her property, but only because she knows the brick facade that borders Audrey’s yard may then come sliding down. (It does, with disastrous results.)

Bernadette’s husband, Elgin Branch ( Billy Crudup ), known as Elgie, is a major player at Microsoft, which means, of course, that their family is wealthy; they’re part of the Pacific Northwest tech boom of the ’90s. Elgie is a warm and strong and loving dude, eternally supportive of Bernadette, though we hear occasional murmurings at home about the fact that he works long hours. (You want to say to the complainers: Welcome to this thing called the 21st century!) Bernadette’s daughter, Bee (played by the sparkling newcomer Emma Nelson), is also nice, with an avid independent streak, though thankfully, and maybe a bit unrealistically, she’s inherited very little of her mother’s acid-putdown quality.

It’s clear that Bernadette, while surrounded by all this love, is in the midst of a severe life crisis, one that she refuses to get help for (she rejects therapy, though hoards pharmaceutical drugs like candy). But the strange thing about “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” which Linklater adapted from Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, is that we in the audience may feel like we’ve figured out her problem long before the movie does.

Bernadette, we learn, was a rising star of the Los Angeles architecture scene, a pioneer of the holistic “green building movement” who won a MacArthur Grant and designed a structure — the 20-Mile House — that became legendary. We don’t learn, for a long time, why Bernadette turned her back on architecture. But it takes no special insight to see that she should be following the one thing that remains her bliss and her calling: designing buildings. The fact that she doesn’t is a neurosis, a depression, a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder; it’s whatever you want to call it. But what we see , watching Bernadette, is someone who’s been graced with everything, more or less, that a person could want: a loving family, comfort and riches, and, on top of that, a God-given talent that resulted in worldly success. She could be living the dream.

True, she and her husband relocated from L.A. to Seattle 20 years ago, when he sold his computer animation program to Microsoft. But it’s not as if she couldn’t have continued her career there. (The film never claims that she couldn’t have.) And now, her gripe — that she feels empty and hates the life around her —­ comes down to the fact that she’s living in a fortress of (literally) her own design yet rejects the upper-middle-class life around her. Something has blocked her; she has issues. But on some level it’s hard not to look at Bernadette and feel like her problem comes down to a form of privileged inertia. She has chosen this life, and she rejects it. We should all have such woes.

If Bernadette were a more compelling character, an electrifying fruitcake-genius, then none of the things I’m sniping about would matter much. But Linklater works in a flowing prosaic style that served him well in a journalistic comedy like “Bernie,” only here the style isn’t lyrical or crazy enough. Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.

You’d think that a woman as self-centered as Bernadette might be a terrible mother, but she and Bee are quite bonded. Yet when Bee, as part of a deal she made with her parents, announces that she wants to take a family trip to Antarctica, Bernadette regards the prospect like a voyage to hell. Is it because she doesn’t want to go to such an icy, remote, forbidding place? Yes, but mostly it’s because she doesn’t want to have to spend time on a cruise ship with other people. Antarctica, however, is where she ends up; it’s as if only the coldness of that place could freeze out her anger. She goes to the ends of the earth to come back to earth. If only we felt that her inner journey was ours.

Reviewed at Park Avenue Screening Room, New York, Aug. 13, 2019. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 110 MIN.

• Production: An Annapurna, United Artists Releasing release of an Annapurna Pictures, Color Force production. Producers: Megan Ellison, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Ginger Sledge. Executive producer: Jillian Longnecker.
• Crew: Director: Richard Linklater. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr. Camera (color, widescreen): Shane F. Kelly. Editor: Sandra Adair. Music: Graham Reynolds.
• With: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Emma Nelson, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne, James Urbaniak, Steve Zahn, Megn Mullally, Troian Bellisario.

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‘where’d you go, bernadette’: film review.

Cate Blanchett stars in Richard Linklater's 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' an adaptation of Maria Semple's comic novel about a Seattle architect who goes missing.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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It’s a given that many creative geniuses are also very neurotic, but when you’re dramatizing such a person, is it more compelling to concentrate on the genius or the neuroses? While the answer, in most cases, would seem to lie in revealing the nexus between the two, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (no question mark) focuses almost exclusively upon the paralyzingly neurotic side of its subject, a brilliant architect who for two decades hasn’t designed so much as a mailbox.

This affords the great Cate Blanchett any number of hyper-ventilating, evasion-centric loony scenes, but also leaves the heart of the matter ’til the very end. Richard Linklater ‘s 19th feature becomes compelling in its final act, but before that too often appears tonally addled and dramatically dawdling.

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Release date: Aug 16, 2019

Based on the best-selling 2012 novel by Maria Semple and adapted by Linklater along with Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, who co-wrote the director’s likable 2008 look at a real-life creative genius, Me and Orson Welles, the new film for much of the way feels like a lightweight account of a heavyweight subject. Opening shots reveal that Blanchett’s Bernadette will wind up kayaking about amid Antarctic icebergs, but a sudden lurch back to five weeks earlier reveals the far more prosaic water-bound predicament of a leaky house in water-logged Seattle. The cutesy strains of a sitcom-suitable score are not encouraging.

Seemingly coiffed to resemble Joan Didion at a certain age, Bernadette is described as one of the greats, a pioneer of the green architectural movement. In the moment, however, she is panicky, committed to avoidance and excuses, heavily medicated and a general pain; these days, she’d rather rant than create. The breezy, faintly jocular tone of the early scenes undercuts and almost makes light of the character’s profound eccentricity and discounts her stated assessment of “the banality of life” — notwithstanding the fact that her husband Elgie Branch ( Billy Crudup ) is a tech titan, albeit currently sidelined, and their teenage daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) makes for three geniuses in the family.

Bernadette’s anti-social behavior exceeds the posted limit when she causes a mudslide from her property to cascade down onto a lower property and into the house of her neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and during a school party, no less. The inundation being one transgression Bernadette can’t literally sweep under the rug, the heretofore passive Elgie finally rouses himself to force an intervention, initially from an esteemed former colleague ( Laurence Fishburne ), who very simply concludes that she “must create!”

Simpler said than done. At this stage the film finally leaves behind the flashing yellow lights and shifts into a higher gear where the woman, however much she may protest, finally begins to peek out from under her protective rock, survey the landscape and come to see that her ultimate salvation may lie in — where else? — Antarctica.

From this point on, the journey becomes a more interesting one, serious but with an eccentric, unorthodox feel entirely dictated by the unusual titular figure, a woman who, we come to learn, has suffered a traumatic creative/professional blow that perhaps others might have risen above but that destroyed her ability to focus and create. It’s a startling dilemma to consider once all the relevant evidence is laid on the table, which may come a little late in the game as far as engaging with the story is concerned. But it does provide the needed heft to carry the story through to its edifying conclusion.

In that a major Diary of a Mad Housewife aspect lies at the heart of the story, one can only wonder at times why Bernadette’s condition has gone unaddressed for so long. She’s worse than rude, actively mean, can’t be trusted and will go to any extent to excuse or hide her irresponsible behavior. It’s a bit unbelievable that, after all these years, her husband hasn’t seriously engaged his wife’s problem. The one vital relationship she maintains is with her brainy daughter, who invariably takes her side and is the one who, albeit inadvertently, opens the portal to her mother’s eventual transformative escape from madness.

As usual chez Linklater, adroit touches and modest grace notes are scattered all about. His disinclination to punch up the melodrama has its pros and cons, and the very specific reason for Bernadette’s extreme behavior eliminates any sense of the problem as a societal one; this is very much one woman’s unique, peculiar and unfortunate story.

Amusement percolates as Bernadette dissembles, expresses scorn for others and otherwise acts out in her specific upper-class environment. As with Melissa McCarthy’s character in the recent and excellent Can You Ever Forgive Me?, laughs are provoked by the spectacle of a middle-aged woman behaving badly and telling people off. But Blanchett’s Bernadette’s is, ultimately, the more disturbed and tragic character, one whose entire life has been overtaken by excuses and, overwhelmingly, a refusal to look her problem straight in the eye and deal with it.

The script departs from and simplifies the book considerably, softening the narrative in the process to the point where fans will likely feel let down. The main actors, and the kind of quiet, offbeat notes Linklater is able to draw out, provide some compensation, and the fact that this is the first American dramatic film ever to be partly filmed on the seventh continent will at the least guarantee it a footnote in cinema history.

Production companies: Annapurna Pictures, Color Force, Detour Filmproduction Distributor: United Artists Cast: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne, Emma Nelson, Zoe Chao, James Urbania, Troian Bellisario, Richard Robichaux, Kate Burton, Steve Zahn, Megan Mullally, David Paymer Director: Richard Linklater Screenwriters: Richard Linklater, Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, based on the novel by Maria Semple Producers: Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Ginger Sledge Executive producers: Megan Ellison, Maria Semple, Jillian Longnecker Director of photography: Shane Kelly Production designer: Bruce Curtis Costume designer: Kari Perkins Editor: Sandra Adair Music: Graham Reynolds Casting: Vicky Boone

Rated PG-13, 104 minutes

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Review: where’d you go, bernadette serves up lifetime-grade chestnuts of wisdom.

The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.

The opening passages of Where’d You Go, Bernadette include a handful of scenes in which an agoraphobic architect and mother, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett), restlessly expresses her internal thoughts inside the empty rooms of her Seattle mansion. Observed in flowing Steadicam shots, these soliloquies—recorded and translated to text by Manjula, the digital assistant on Bernadette’s smartphone—give space to reflect on how the woman’s eclectic furnishings grow out of her racing mental landscape. And in performing them, Blanchett offers the rare cinematic spectacle of a mother in her alone time, compelled to let her imagination and anxieties loose outside the pressures of maternal duty. In these moments, the film, an unapologetically straightforward adaptation of Maria Semple’s best-selling novel, briefly takes on the tone of something candidly personal.

It’s a shame, then, that Where’d You Go, Bernadette is cloyingly beholden to the demands of its crowd-pleasing narrative arc—that of a creative woman driven to ennui by motherhood and middle age yet rescued from the brink by an inspiring vacation and the love of her family. It’s nice, reassuring stuff, not false by any standard, but told with such didacticism and cuteness that one can’t help but be bewildered by the fact that the film was co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. Where the Texas auteur’s leisurely paced Boyhood and Everybody Wants Some!! excel in their attention to the nuanced spectacle of characters changing over time, Where’d You Go, Bernadette plays like all of its air has been sucked out in the interest of plot progression, which it conducts with the workshopped efficiency of a television movie mindful of commercial breaks. In fact, with its coverage-dependent mise-en-scène, off-the-rack musical score, and tacked-on bookending voiceovers, Linklater’s latest feels strangely close to something Lifetime might have churned out in the early aughts.

The film establishes its narrative conflicts quickly and bluntly, often through dialogue, simple juxtaposition, and, in one particularly dull case, a YouTube mini-documentary about Bernadette that plays in full in order to clarify her backstory. A brilliant and influential architect in the midst of a long hiatus after a demoralizing relocation and a series of miscarriages, she displaces her creative frustration on her city and its inhabitants, including her prosperous, TED Talks-giving husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup); stuffy neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig); and Soo-Lin (Zoe Chao), a gossipy associate of Elgie and friend of Audrey. Her only routine source of joy is her wise-beyond-her-years daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), who loves her unconditionally and whom she treats perhaps a bit too much like a peer.

Symptomatic of Linklater’s always-generous worldview, the film sees Bernadette’s quirks not as deficiencies, but as inevitable side effects of life’s persistent curveballs. When the character refers to herself as a “creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares,” it’s clear that the filmmaker endorses that assessment, and perhaps even recognizes it as a description of his own artistic career. For all their suspicion toward Bernadette, Elgie and Audrey aren’t characterized entirely negatively either, for each is given a path to redemption, and Wiig’s portrayal of her character’s transition from belligerence to empathy in particular is one of the highpoints of Where’d You Go, Bernadette .

Rather, in true boomer fashion, Linklater reserves his cynicism for technology, kickstarting the film’s third act with the contrived revelation that Manjula is actually a Russian-operated phishing scheme seeking to steal Bernadette’s identity. This development briefly gets a Department of Homeland Security agent, Marcus Strang (James Urbaniak), and a therapist, Dr. Kurtz (Judy Greer), caught up in the narrative, but it’s all really just a busy preamble to the Antarctica family vacation that’s hinted at from the very first scene. Bernadette has her reservations about the trip, Bee thinks it will be cathartic for the family, Elgie is too preoccupied with his career to concern himself with the logistics, and the shadowy forces behind Manjula are poised to swoop in and cause chaos during the scheduled dates.

What ends up happening is neither the transporting escape Bee wants nor the complete disaster Manjula intends to enact, but something messily in between that triggers a coordinated stream of life lessons—and a few uninspired drone shots of icebergs. Indeed, in its eagerness to diagnose Bernadette’s existential impasse, the film lays on thick the kind of back-patting chestnuts of wisdom that have become increasingly common in Linklater’s recent films, groaners like “Popularity is overrated” and “You don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna do.” Such sentiments have always been window dressing in Linklater’s nonchalantly libertarian body of work, but if in many cases his films have tacitly acknowledged the limits of language to articulate life’s mysteries, here there’s very little sense of a frontier to be explored. If Bernadette is Linklater and Blanchett’s collaborative expression of the right balance between parenting and artistry, it’s a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening—and privileged—idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette Reviews

Linklater’s film is a loose adaptation of the best-selling novel of the same name. Fans of the novel might take exception to how loose. Chief among the changes: Bernadette is around an awful lot for a story about someone who disappears.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

I even liked its messiness. That may be a weird compliment, but this is a weird movie, and I guess I like that about it too.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Cate Blanchett transforms what read on the page as “kooky-neurotic-but-loving-mom” into an abrasively self-pitying, invective-spewing depressive...

Full Review | Aug 18, 2022

Bernadette is so relatable thanks to Blanchett.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2022

Blanchett makes this character feel layered and engaging and delivers another great performance that she can add to her filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 4, 2022

Despite my affection for Linklaters work, the persistent need to support mid-budget films at the cinema, and the appeal of its luminous star, Blanchett, that beacon of class and talent, none of it is enough to recommend.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 26, 2022

While the film has value as a springboard for conversations about something everyone has to deal with - namely, failure - it doesn't quite live up to the quality of some of Linklater's other work.

Full Review | Aug 12, 2021

A moving actor's portrait of an artist's real anguish, hidden and gift-wrapped within a Gap ad that is Bernadette's scenery and style.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2021

Bernadette's antics and adventures mix a lot of talk with impressive visuals, worth watching to find answers about destinations, both physical and mental.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2021

Linklater's humane liberalism has a certain value as an antidote to the brutality and foulness of official political life and culture, but we live in times more turbulent and perilous than the Drake Passage.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2021

Finds touching moments in the story of a woman who had to get lost to find herself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 31, 2021

The film adaption loses the quick, flirty pace the book so artfully employs and chooses instead on safe, but laborious storytelling that, despite its many good performances, may not keep you awake until the credits roll.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2021

This misguided comedy gets off to a strong start and then self-destructs in record time as what was initially charming soon becomes grating and irritating.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Nov 21, 2020

Where'd You Go, Bernadette might lure in fans of the book but as someone coming to the material with no background knowledge, I was disappointed.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Aug 31, 2020

I'm happy to report that Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a pretty well assembled and often very well written film, with a towering performance from Blanchett at its heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 31, 2020

Fans of the novel may take umbrage at the considerable narrative streamlining Linklater and his co-writers have applied to the film's third act, but the changes make for a thrilling and satisfying resolution.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2020

It isn't that Linklater has delivered a disaster, but there's an irascible feeling that someone -- nay, almost everyone -- behind the scenes was phoning it in.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 28, 2020

Even Blanchett's performance is not enough for the drama to have a cohesive solution. In the end it is somewhat conventional. It's a minor Linklater movie. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jul 27, 2020

It's easy to see why Cate Blanchett was drawn to such a project - especially with Richard Linklater... But his film adaptation of Maria Semple's satirical novel about motherhood and ambition is uncharacteristically ham-fisted.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2020

Peppered with zany touches that irk more often than they delight, the film lacks the wily spark that infuses Linklater's best work.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2020

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Where'd you go, bernadette, common sense media reviewers.

Book-based tale of eccentric genius; mature themes, cursing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Several positive messages about not judging others

At first Bernadette seems like a privileged, white

Part of a hillside slides down and crashes into a

Kisses between a married couple. A character acts

Two uses of "f--k you," as well as the occasional

Jaguar sedan, Under Armour, Dansko, Doc Martens, D

Adults drink at receptions, dinners, and on a crui

Parents need to know that Where'd You Go, Bernadette is director Richard Linklater's adaptation of Maria Semple's best-selling 2012 novel about an eccentric, anxious, and borderline agoraphobic Seattle mother. But Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) is more than she seems (a bored, rich housewife); she's actually an…

Positive Messages

Several positive messages about not judging others (even a city) by stereotypes, the importance of connecting to the world and others around you, and the power of close, honest parent-child relationships. Bernadette's story also shows how exceptional men and women can be judged differently for their parenting skills and personality traits. Conversation between Bernadette and Paul stresses the life-changing difference a mentor can make. The idea that creators need to create or they become "menaces to society" is worth discussion. Bernadette and Elgin's decision to weather the storms in their marriage demonstrates how marriage and commitment are more than a feeling but also a choice.

Positive Role Models

At first Bernadette seems like a privileged, white stay-at-home mom who hates everyone and everything but her husband and daughter. But as the story continues, it becomes clear that she's also a genius, a problem solver, and a dedicated wife and mom. Bee is a caring, mature teen daughter who loves her mother and considers her a best friend. Paul realizes how he's failed his wife and why he needs to support her as she's supported him.

Violence & Scariness

Part of a hillside slides down and crashes into a home, causing property damage and frightening guests at a party. Arguments.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kisses between a married couple. A character acts smitten with her boss.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Two uses of "f--k you," as well as the occasional use of "bitch," "s--t," "douche bag," "a--hole," "ass," "crap," "hell," "damn," "oh my God," etc. A woman calls the other moms at her kids' school "gnats." Bee angrily tells her friend Kennedy to "take her Ritalin and be quiet" and then reminds her dad that "he doesn't even like Kennedy."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Jaguar sedan, Under Armour, Dansko, Doc Martens, Dell. Elgin works at Microsoft, and the company is mentioned several times. Lots and lots of Amazon (with noticeable Amazon Prime packing tape) boxes and Apple products: MacBook, iPad, iPhone. One Ocean Expeditions to Antarctica is also featured prominently in the third act.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink at receptions, dinners, and on a cruise, mostly wine and cocktails. Quick glimpse of a teen vaping marijuana with an adult acquaintance. Conversation about a teen who's stoned.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Where'd You Go, Bernadette is director Richard Linklater 's adaptation of Maria Semple's best-selling 2012 novel about an eccentric, anxious, and borderline agoraphobic Seattle mother. But Bernadette ( Cate Blanchett ) is more than she seems (a bored, rich housewife); she's actually an architectural genius who hasn't worked in nearly 20 years. Expect a few instances of strong language (including two uses of "f--k" and the occasional "bitch," "ass," "s--t," etc.), as well as several shots of Bernadette's conspicuous consumerism in the form of Amazon packages and Apple products. A teen vapes, and adults drink. Mature content also includes marital discord and a couple of upsetting arguments. But there's plenty to discuss, from sexism and stereotypes to the importance of mentors and close parent-teen relationships. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (5)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 5 parent reviews

Deeply touching and funny. Brilliant cast!

One of the worst movies i’ve ever seen, what's the story.

Richard Linklater 's WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE is an adaptation of Maria Semple's popular 2012 book about an eccentric, anxious, semi-agoraphobic, and mean Seattle mother/wife named Bernadette Fox ( Cate Blanchett ). Bernadette only really cares about her daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), and her husband, Elgin Branch ( Billy Crudup ), a rich Microsoft visionary. And she especially can't stand the "Galen School Gnats" (the busybody, do-gooder moms at Bee's liberal-elite private school), like her neighbor Audrey ( Kristen Wiig ). After finishing middle school with perfect grades, the precocious Bee asks for a holiday family trip to Antarctica -- a request to which Bernadette, who can barely leave the house and outsources nearly all of her duties to Manjula, an email-based virtual assistant in India, surprisingly agrees. But as the trip nears, Bernadette -- who, it turns out, is a former MacArthur "Genius" award-winning architect who hasn't worked in 20 years -- goes missing.

Is It Any Good?

The performances, particularly Blanchett's, outweigh the product in this adaptation that favors audiences familiar with the story and its anxious-genius main character. There's a moment in the film where Bernadette tells a research scientist that she needs to inhabit a space completely to design for it; that's also how Blanchett immerses herself in a character, whether it's Queen Elizabeth, Galadriel, Kate Hepburn, Jasmine, or Hela. The character of Bernadette is purposely unlikable at first, with her utter contempt and petty squabbles and her upper-class distance from reality. Her one happy place is any time she's with her daughter, Bee, who's the apple of Bernadette's eye and possibly the only person around whom she's joyful. But Blanchett is brilliant at expressing the subtle changes that revive Bernadette's artistic energy.

Opposite Blanchett, the standouts start with young Nelson, who's wonderful as Bernadette's intelligent and curious miracle child; may casting directors find more coming-of-age work for her. Crudup's Elgin is perhaps too sympathetic in the film and not as overtly an egotistical workaholic as his character is in the book, but it's still clear that none of the other school parents blame or hate him for not being involved, the way they do Bernadette. And Laurence Fishburne is remarkably effective in one pivotal conversation scene as Bernadette's prophetic and inspiring former mentor. Visually, the film focuses on architecture and the design of each space in a way that honors the main character. Plotwise, however, those who haven't read the book may be less invested in the central story arc, especially with the Manjula storyline, which is more humorously handled in the source material. This is an adaptation to see because of the performances more than anything else, because Blanchett always makes it worth a viewer's time.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether Where'd You Go, Bernadette is likely to be best enjoyed by those who read the novel first, or whether it's easy to follow if you haven't read the book. What are some of your favorite page-to-screen adaptations, and why?

What does Paul mean when he says that artists become a "menace to society" when they can't create? Does it change the way you perceive Bernadette when it becomes clear that she's a brilliant and renowned architect?

How does the movie portray parent-teen relationships? Why is the bond between Bernadette and Bee so unique?

What does Bernadette's story arc teach about self-awareness, change, and redemption? Are there any role models in the movie? How do they display curiosity and perseverance ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 16, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : November 26, 2019
• Cast : Cate Blanchett , Emma Nelson , Billy Crudup
• Director : Richard Linklater
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studios : Annapurna Pictures , United Artists
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 104 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some strong language and drug material
• Last updated : April 29, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

• Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• August 16, 2019
• Cate Blanchett as Bernadette Fox; Billy Crudup as Elgie; Emma Nelson as Bee; Kristen Wiig as Audrey; Zoe Chao as Soo-Lin; Judy Greer as Dr. Kurtz

Home Release Date

• March 15, 2021
• Richard Linklater

Distributor

Movie review.

Crazy lives on a continuum.

Mental illness is rarely a matter of being just fine on one hand and asking your filing cabinet out to tea on the other. Sure, sometimes the answer’s easy, obvious. But often, it’s not so simple to define. And sometimes, it depends on who’s defining it.

Ask Bee, the daughter of Bernadette Fox, about her mom, and she’ll emphatically tell you that her mom is just fine . Oh, certainly Bernadette’s a little eccentric, a bit high-strung and (let’s just say it) pretty antisocial. But when they’re together, they joke and laugh and sing their hearts out to old ’80s tunes.

Bernadette may not be perfect, but she’s Bee’s best friend. Nothing crazy about that, is there? “I love Mom just the way she is,” she says.

Elgie, Bernadette’s wealthy, brilliant husband, loves her too. But he remembers the woman she once was—and who she’s now become. And that worries him.

Bernadette was once a gifted architect—one who set the profession on fire and seemed destined for greatness. But Elgie’s fasttracked career at Microsoft, a crushing professional setback and family issues pushed Bernadette in a different direction. She hasn’t designed a building in years.

Now Bernadette barely sleeps. She stalks the halls of their sprawling Seattle house in the gloamy hours, letting worry upon worry stack like LEGOs. She stopped taking most of her medication a while ago. Now she pours the pill in one massive bottle, marveling at their colors.

And things seem to be getting worse. Elgie gets a police report about how Bernadette ran over a neighbor’s foot. He spies her in a pharmacy, passed out on a couch inside. He listens to her rant about Seattle’s litany of evils, fume over small slights. The confident, beautiful woman he married has become brittle and confused. She’s gone wrong somehow, and he needs to figure out how to make it right again.

One night, Bee reminds her parents of a promise they made years ago: If she got straight A’s through middle school, they’d give her anything she wanted. Now, Bee announces, she wants to take a family trip to Antarctica.

Bernadette is horrified. She hates travel. She despises boats. She’s terrified of getting seasick. Why, she barely leaves the house as it is. The thought of traveling to Antarctica, by boat, in rough waters, with a bunch of strangers ? “I’m not good when exposed to people,” she admits.

But Bee desperately wants to go, and Bernadette desperately loves her daughter.

But will she survive the trip? Will anyone else?

Positive Elements

Bernadette does love Bee, and we see that deep affection displayed often. But it’s Bee’s reciprocity of that love that takes center stage here. Bee is fiercely defensive of her mother’s sanity and ability—lashing out like (ironically) an angry mama bear when she feels that Bernadette’s being threatened in some manner.

Admittedly, Bee’s affection sometimes transcends both prudence and logic. But in the context of family—where we’re supposed to love people without condition—there’s something beautiful in her fierce loyalty to her struggling mother. And when Bernadette (under some extreme but not insurmountable conditions) runs away from Elgie and Bee, Bee’s pursuit of her to the literal ends of the earth is beautiful and, in its own way, inspiring.

Even when Bernadette leaves with barely a backward glance, and even when Elgie begins to believe that Bernadette is dead (perhaps by her own hand), Bee holds out more than hope. She’s convinced her mother would never leave her. Not really.

“We love each other,” she says. “And she would never do anything where we’d never see each other again.”

Then there’s Elgie. Sure, he doesn’t defend Bernadette like Bee does; and Bee doesn’t always give him the credit he deserves. But viewers here hshould: Indeed, I would imagine that most mental health professionals would laud Elgie’s level-headed response to Bernadette’s increasingly worrisome behavior over Bee’s uncritical, passionate defenses. And the sacrifices he makes for both of the women in his life should not be minimized.

This family drama is also dotted with characters that help and support Bernadette (sometimes against their own inclinations) and lovely little insights. Including the following:

[ Spoiler warning ] For much of the movie, we’re left to wonder not only just how crazy Bernadette might be (and whether she might be sent away for in-patient psychiatric care), but also whether Bernadette and Elgie’s marriage can survive at all. In an end narration, Bee clears up that uncertainty by telling us about penguins that supposedly mated for life. Turns out, she tells us, that’s not absolutely true: Just 80% of them do. “The ones that stay together are making a choice,” she says. “Just like Mom and Dad.”

Spiritual Elements

Much earlier in Bernadette and Elgie’s relationship, Elgie gave Bernadette a Catholic medallion depicting St. Bernadette: She’s a young, 19th-century girl who is said to have received 16 visions, or “miracles,” from Mary. That medallion becomes something of a talisman for the couple’s relationship, with Elgie comparing St. Bernadette’s miracles with achievements in his Bernadette’s life.

The first “miracle” was Bernadette’s first eye-catching house, decorated largely with bifocal glasses. The second was her famed “20 Mile House,” built entirely from resources within just 20 miles of the site. The other 14 miracles, they say, were wrapped up in their daughter, Bee, who was born with some very serious health problems but who still survived. (We see that medallion at the end of the movie, and someone suggests that Bernadette has more miracles in her still.)

Elgie and Bernadette’s Seattle home used to be a sprawling religious school for girls. We see some religious iconography here and there, and the family dog gets stuck in the building’s old, cross-festooned confessional. (Bernadette has to break an outside window to get the dog out.)

Bernadette texts and emails her high-tech personal assistant, Manjula, who’s apparently located in India. Bernadette suggests at one point that Manjula work her “Hindu magic” to procure her a fishing vest. There’s a suggestion that there’s a “design flaw” in humankind. At one point, someone refers to Bernadette as the “b–ch goddess of architecture.”

Sexual Content

As Elgie’s relationship with Bernadette decays, he relies on his new assistant, Soo-Lin, more and more—hinting at what some might characterize as an emotional affair. Bernadette is clearly jealous, and she speculates to a neighbor that it’s just a matter of time before the two become lovers.

Violent Content

While picking up Bee from school, Bernadette peels out of the parking line quickly to avoid speaking with Audrey, her hyper-involved neighbor. The car may make contact with Audrey: She falls to the ground dramatically, and she later alleges that Bernadette ran over and broke her foot (even though doctors can’t find anything wrong with it, and Bernadette swears the tire never touched Audrey’s toes).

Bernadette also (passive) aggressively prunes her blackberry bushes (at Audrey’s suggestion), which results in weakening the hillside between her and Audrey’s house. During a heavy rain, a wave of mud breaks down a retaining wall and washes into Audrey’s house during a party. Both women engage in angry, profane screaming matches.

One character kicks down a door. Some believe that Bernadette is suicidal. We hear that Bernadette suffered a series of miscarriages before Bee was born, and Bernadette talks about those experiences in graphic, painful detail.

Crude or Profane Language

Characters use the f-word twice and the s-word about five times. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—“, “douchebag,” “crap” and “sucks.” God’s name is misused about 14 times, while Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Elgie, Bernadette and others drink wine on occasion. Bernadette, terrified of getting seasick, seeks a powerful anti-nausea medication she can bring with her on the trip to Antarctica. When she tries to get it at the pharmacy, though, they tell her that the drug she’s asking for is a pretty strong anti-psychotic medication as well, one that requires additional doctor approvals before they’ll allow her to have it. Bernadette opts for less potent medication instead.

Perhaps just as problematic, if not more so, are the drugs that Bernadette doesn’t take. She’s weaned herself off many of the meds designed to regulate her mood and poured them into one gigantic bottle. She says she likes the look of them all together, while others suggest that her hoarding medication implies suicidal tendencies.

Audrey’s son (whom she adores) smokes with a caterer at a party, possibly marijuana. Someone later tells Audrey that her son gets high at school pretty frequently.

Other Negative Elements

[ Spoiler Warning ] The only person that Bernadette really confides in is her Indian assistant, Manjula. Turns out, “Manjula” isn’t a person at all, but rather a Russian identity theft ring that, through a naïve Bernadette, has collected scads of passwords and bank account numbers. When Elgie learns about the scam (through the FBI), he realizes that Bernadette needs some serious help. The FBI’s visit (as well as a subsequent intervention), sends Bernadette over the edge. On the pretext of going to the bathroom, Bernadette escapes the house and runs away.

Bernadette and neighbor Audrey are locked in a power struggle filled with catty moves and retaliations. We learn that Audrey’s son, whom she adores, frequently makes fun of her behind her back. Neighbors gossip. We hear references to urination.

I didn’t have high hopes for this movie, which is based on a 2012 novel of the same name by Maria Semple. On the surface, it looked as though Bernadette would be locked in a well-worn storyline of me-focused rediscovery—a plot that today often involves sacrificing family and duty for self-fulfillment. And indeed, one of the movie’s trailers specifically suggests as much.

“I think what happened to my mom was that she got so focused on her family that she forgot about herself,” Bee tells us.

That line, though, is nowhere to be found. Instead, the film begins with Bee telling a very different story—how we humans are wired to always look for the next great thing. We buy a diamond necklace (Bee says) and it gives us joy. A year later, you look at it and say “this old thing.”

“I think that’s what happened to my mom,” Bee says. “She forgot to see all the good stuff in her life.”

That sets us up for a far different, and far more nuanced, movie. Yes, rediscovery of self is still a huge, and central, part of this story. But Bernadette’s discovery is done in the context of a family who loves her—and a family that she loves in return. This is a story about the war that most of us feel—that quiet battle between passion and duty; the tension between what we feel we’re called to do and what we’re asked to do.

The film reminds us that we’re built with certain talents and gifts. And even though it doesn’t explicitly stress our Builder—the God who gave us those gifts to glorify Him and enrich others—it does remind us that we waste those talents at our peril. We see how Bernadette’s struggles are largely born from her inability and unwillingness to embrace the gifts she’s been given.

“People like you must create ,” an old architect friend tells Bernadette. “If you don’t, you become a menace to society.”

But we don’t use those skills in a vacuum. And for many of us, our gifts and talents are sometimes sublimated beneath the responsibilities and relationships we develop through life. Other times, the gifts we have become opportunities to glorify ourselves , not God . Through all, the film suggestions, our families and friends—and the responsibilities they entail—keep us grounded. They remind us what life and purpose really should be about: sacrifice and service and loving well.

And here’s the thing: Bernadette—both the mother and the architect—understands this. Others praise her gifts. But whenever we hear her talk about her own architectural work, it’s all in the context of how it’ll serve the people who use it. “I never considered myself a great architect,” she says. “I’m more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.”

And even as Bernadette rediscovers her love for architecture, she doesn’t lose sight of the people she loves. Yes, she’s been given great gifts … and the greatest, she knows, is her daughter.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette , isn’t about choosing career over family, or choosing family over career. It’s not, I don’t think, about punting traditional gender roles (though some viewers, admittedly, could interpret it as such). Instead, this drama tells us that we were made for something. And when we find and pursue that purpose, we’re better able to serve the people around us.

The film has its problems. But underneath, it reminds us of the importance of our God-given gifts … and the people who are closest to us as well.

Be sure to read our review of the book connected to this movie: Where’d You Go, Bernadette .

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Gladiator 2 set photos reveal paul mescal's lucius for the first time after a bloody battle, 10 best comedy movies of 2024, even with a terrific performance by cate blanchett to propel it through its rough patches, where'd you go, bernadette never truly finds its footing..

Where'd You Go, Bernadette essentially has the same problem as the eponymous character: it has the potential for greatness, but seems confused about what it is or how to get where it wants to go. Director Richard Linklater's penchant for balancing exaggerated comedy with real sadness serves the film well, but the story's execution is clunky and often too messy for its own good. The movie has similarly mixed success with its efforts to adapt Maria Semple's acclaimed book and restructure it as the kind of acting-driven character study - one where plot is a secondary concern - Linklater's best known for. Even with a terrific performance by Cate Blanchett to propel it through its rough patches, Where'd You Go, Bernadette never truly finds its footing.

Blanchett stars here as Bernadette Fox, a once-famous L.A. architect who has since moved to Seattle with her husband Elgin (Billy Crudup), a tech genius who works for Microsoft. Now a devoted stay at home mother to her beloved daughter Bee (Emma Nelson), Bernadette doesn't like to leave their house or socialize with the other parents at Bee's school, especially their overbearing neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig). When Bee gets both her parents to reluctantly agree to take a trip to Antarctica, as a reward for her perfect grades in school, it sends Bernadette into a crisis that creates more conflict with those around her. However, after she takes off in an attempt to try and make things right, it's up to Bee and Elgin to figure out where she's gone (in more than one sense).

Whereas Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is an epistolary novel composed of emails, transcripts, and so forth, Linklater and his cowriters Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. ( Me and Orson Welles ) adapt her source material into a screenplay that, for its first half, is full of rambling conversations and monologues where Bernadette dictates tasks to an assistant in India via voice-to-text. The approach makes sense enough for Linklater, whose scripts are frequently very talky, but results in loads of ungainly information dumps, many of which rob the more dramatic and heartbreaking reveals about Bernadette's past of their emotional impact. Even the film's efforts to make some exposition more cinematic, by having it delivered in a short YouTube documentary about Bernadette's architectural career, results in more long-winded interviews and voiceover. Because of this, something is lost in translation and what played out as an insightful comedy-drama on the printed page comes off as tedious and frequently unfocused in movie form.

Fortunately, Where'd You Go Bernadette is more capable when it comes to presenting Bernadette's house - a beautifully dilapidated and expansive piece of property being gradually overrun with wild blackberry bushes - as a visual metaphor for her life and what she's become without an outlet to channel her creative energies into. Linklater and his longtime DP Shane F. Kelly do an equally nice job of juxtaposing the soggy, cluttered grayness of Seattle with the sunny and unenclosed Antarctic settings (where Bernadette's spark for life is reignited) during the film's second half, especially as the proceedings start to become a little lighter on dialogue. There are some pacing issues, though, and the editing feels uneven when it comes to the movie's overarching structure. Where'd You Go, Bernadette 's release date was delayed multiple times, but it's difficult to say if it went through some re-tooling in post-production or if these problems are simply a reflection of the film's larger issues adapting its source material.

Still, by far, the best thing about Where'd You Go, Bernadette is Blanchett. The Oscar-winner perfect encapsulates Bernadette's sheer passion, frustrations, snarkiness, and insecurities through her behavior and manner of speech, bringing her to life in a way the film can't manage to do with the story around her. Linklater, who is never lacking for ambition and has grown increasingly prolific over the years, clearly sympathizes with Bernadette for having put her artistic pursuits on hold (and not only to begin her family), and it shows in the movie's treatment of the character. The film also takes the time to develop the mother-daughter relationship between Bernadette and Bee, even as it fumbles the latter's arc (as she comes to realize just how little she really knows about her own mom). Wiig as Audrey eventually gets some welcome humanization too, but the movie otherwise wastes its talented supporting cast - which further includes Judy Greer and Laurence Fishburne - on characters that come off as either caricatures or glorified sounding boards for Bernadette.

There's a captivating story about what happens when creative people stop, well, creating and hide the truth about how they feel (from not only their loved ones, but even themselves) rattling around in Where'd You Go, Bernadette , but it just doesn't form a cohesive whole in the end. And as much as Blanchett elevates whatever's happening when she appears, it's not enough to prevent the movie from coming off feeling like an interesting misfire, but a misstep all the same. Still, those who are fans of Semple's novel and/or Linklater's films in general may want to check this one out at some point, if only to appreciate the elements that do work. If nothing else, it goes to show: even the most creative people aren't always on top of their game.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 109 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some strong language and drug material.

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Richard Linklater’s latest removes the mystery from the Marie Semple novel, but ends up a flawed but welcome reflection on aging and creativity.

If movies about male mid-life crises could fill a metaphorical library, women-centric versions would take up just a single bookshelf. For all the nagging wife stereotypes Hollywood has offered up over the years, there’s been too little time spent exploring the nuanced emotional realities of women aging into their 40s and beyond, grappling with family and career priorities and the tricky ways they intertwine. In her best-selling 2012 novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Marie Semple turned one woman’s midlife crisis into a comedic mystery about a missing mom and her teenage daughter’s mission to find her.

Richard Linklater ’s new film adaptation downplays the intrigue and presents a character study instead. In this case, the title is existential rather than literal: What happened to the young, groundbreaking creative that Bernadette Fox ( Cate Blanchett ) used to be, and how can she get her back?

It doesn’t always work. Drenched in heightened whimsy and heavily overplotted, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an odd, uneven film, and there’s more about it that misses than hits. The supporting characters are cartoonish, the third act is choppy, and Linklater never quite gets a comfortable handle on the satirical screwball tone of the source material. Still, the moments that do work are so lovely that they almost make the rest worth sitting through. Underneath the film’s try-hard twee exterior, Linklater crafts a moving mother/daughter story and an emotionally honest portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Bernadette herself is winningly brought to life by Blanchett, operating well outside the high fantasy and highbrow period piece aesthetics that are so often her bread and butter. It’s almost shocking to see her in the capri pants, striped shirts, and oversized sunglasses of a wealthy, chicly disheveled stay-at-home mom in Seattle. Bernadette takes the stay-at-home part rather seriously. She’s not agoraphobic, exactly, but her general distaste for the outside world and the people who reside in it keep her inside more often than not. She farms out her day-to-day responsibilities to a New Delhi-based virtual assistant, narrating long emails that nod to the epistolary form of the novel. A former architect, she’s perpetually futzing around with half-finished home improvement projects in her dilapidated Victorian mansion of a home—the bane of a block of otherwise perfectly manicured suburban cookie-cutter perfection and a particular eyesore for Bernadette’s meticulous neighbor Audrey ( Kristen Wiig ).

Underneath the film’s try-hard twee exterior, Linklater crafts a moving mother/daughter story and an emotionally honest portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Bernadette secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) enjoys pissing Audrey off. In fact, she seems to enjoy pissing the whole world off. The only people Bernadette can stand are her husband Elgin ( Billy Crudup ), a soft-spoken tech genius at Microsoft, and her precocious middle school-aged daughter Bee ( Emma Nelson ). The latter relationship serves as the beating heart of the film, and it’s where Linklater’s humanistic skills shine brightest. Driving home from school, Bernadette and Bee duet on Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” unembarrassed and carefree in their love for the song and their love for each other, something Blanchett and Nelson beautifully capture. Whatever animosity Bernadette may have against the world, there’s nothing but warmth in her relationship with her daughter, the only person who seems to genuinely understand her.

So when Bee decides she’d like to attend a prestigious boarding school across the country, it sends an already frazzled Bernadette spiraling. Coupled with her escalating rivalry with Audrey, Bee’s request to take an impromptu family vacation to Antarctica, and Elgin’s growing concerns about his wife’s well-being, Bernadette is forced to confront traumas she long ago buried and defense mechanisms she long ago erected. Unfortunately, just as she starts to take a clear-eyed look at who she’s become, who she used to be, and who she’d like to be, her judgmental community starts to conspire against her—pushing Bernadette’s fight or flight instincts to the extreme.

Working with credited co-writers Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., Linklater is interested in exploring the ways women, and mothers in particular, often subsume their personal dreams for their families without even realizing that’s what they’re doing. The film reveals Bernadette’s backstory in slow drips, including the heartbreaking professional and personal setbacks that caused her to leave behind the pioneering eco-friendly designs that seemed poised to revolutionize the architectural world. What she gained is a beautiful relationship with Bee. What she lost is her sense of self, and potentially her grip on reality. An old colleague ( Laurence Fishburne ) warns that creators who don’t create become a menace to society, and Blanchett plays Bernadette with a mixture of dignity and childish impulsiveness that makes it tricky to tell whether she needs an outside intervention or just someone to see her full humanity beyond her roles of wife and mother.

In that way, Bernadette’s story feels like a companion piece to Céline’s similar concerns in Linklater’s Before Midnight , although, tonally, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is attempting to be more of a mainstream crowd-pleaser in the vein of his 2003 comedy School Of Rock . It doesn’t fully hit the mark, however. Like its titular character, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an acquired taste with appreciable depths beneath its oddball surface. (It’s also the rare film to make the crisp, snowy calm of Antarctica look like a vacation destination worth visiting.)

The performers aren’t always in sync with the film’s tone or with each other, and the stylish costume and production design do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to building a coherent world out of a sitcom-ish plot. Still, in a cinematic landscape where stories of women finding themselves are too few and far between, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a welcome gift, even if it’s an imperfect one.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette sneaks out of its old life and into movie theaters August 16.

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Where’d You Go, Bernadette ? Nowhere, Damn It

On the basis of his new film, Where’d You Go, Bernadette , Richard Linklater wouldn’t be much good at what TV writers call “breaking” a story — i.e., turning a premise into a blueprint, a series of firm narrative beats. He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like Dazed and Confused , Before Sunrise , and Boyhood ), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette (played onscreen by Cate Blanchett) who vanishes from her ramshackle Seattle manse after an escalating series of crises and tantrums. Semple (the daughter of the late TV and film writer Lorenzo Semple Jr.) largely writes from the point of view of Bernadette’s teenage daughter, Bee, who’s busy poring over fragments of her missing mother’s life: rambling messages from Bernadette to her “virtual” assistant in India; emails about Bernadette between two disapproving mothers of students at Bee’s progressive school; earnest letters from psychiatrists and FBI agents and mentors from Bernadette’s past. It’s only late in the book that Bee gets a hunch where her mother might have gone, and the revelation is a doozy: Antarctica!

Damn, I’ve spoiled it. No, hold on, I haven’t, because the opening of the movie of Where’d You Go, Bernadette features Bernadette on a kayak amid ice floes while Bee (Emma Nelson) reads a passage from Semple’s book that doesn’t fit those images particularly well. Then the movie jumps back three weeks to show how Bernadette got there, to the edge of the world. Instead of a mystery from the perspective of a bereft daughter, we get a series of dramatic non sequiturs in which Blanchett’s Bernadette takes up the entire foreground. Blanchett’s face holds the screen — she’s a real movie star — and it’s fun to see her swooping around Seattle behind giant sunglasses, running from people in a cartoon panic or staying and dropping zingers. But it’s a showy, external performance, and much of the time you don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about the character. (Bernadette hates everyone, but then almost everyone is hateful, including Bernadette.) She’s not very good company. Why are we even watching her?

In contrast, the book —

Stop. Let me acknowledge that few things are more annoying than people (especially critics) who spend a lot of time complaining about the ways in which a movie is different from a book. Here’s why we’re worth listening to. Sometimes you go to a film and you have no idea what you’re watching. You can’t even tell why it was made. It wasn’t until I read Semple’s book (after I saw the film) that the story began to make a larger sense, as Bee very slowly homed in on the mother she adored but barely knew the essence of. A brilliant groper, Bernadette spent the first part of her life trying to rethink architecturally the idea of home; and she was fumbling her way toward greatness when a billionaire British game-show magnate effectively slapped her down, leaving her traumatized, dysfunctional, homeless. Her husband, Elgin, made millions after a corporate buyout and now spends his days perfecting a supersecret Virtual Assistant project for Microsoft, but wealth has only intensified Bernadette’s isolation. (The fixation on virtual assistants is a metaphor.) For two decades, she has been slouching toward Antarctica to be reborn.

The above can be vaguely discerned in the screenplay by Linklater, Holly Gent, and Vince Palmo, but there are big gaps (was the film heavily edited?) and mistakes of underemphasis. The crushing encounter with the British ass is cut to the bone. The affair between Elgin (Billy Crudup) and a co-worker (Zoe Chao), who also has a child at Bee’s school, was either never shot or shot and dumped, so the character doesn’t really have a punch line; and you can see Crudup once again (he’s also doing it in After the Wedding ) staring helplessly from the sidelines at women who feel things so damn intensely. Kristen Wiig is wonderfully funny as Bernadette’s overbearing neighbor and school nemesis, but she and a few of the other actors don’t quite mesh with Linklater’s draggy realism. (Wiig and Blanchett do share the one scene that works, in which the pair have a jittery détente.) With so much that’s out of focus, a great line like the one by Bernadette’s architectural mentor (Laurence Fishburne) suffers from over emphasis: “People like you must create or become a menace to society.” I can hear it in an Italian accent: You must-a create or you’re a gonna die-a.

Emma Nelson has a lovely, sane presence as Bee — she lets you see how a beloved child can at once ground an unstable parent and be a jolly co-conspirator. But she can’t save the scenes in Antarctica from banality. The generally quirky and original composer Graham Reynolds supplies a score that’s alternately too sprightly and too corny-plaintive, and the landscape looks as if it was blue-screened in. Emphatically it was not: Much time and money were reportedly spent so the cast and crew could access our least-accessible continent, but because there’s no sense of mystery or danger or surprise, you don’t feel as if you’re at the edge of the world. You always know where Bernadette is, damn it.

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‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’: Blanchett-Led Bestseller Gets Lost in Translation

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Richard Linklater has already proved himself a master surveyor of the rocky terrain of motherhood — think of the complexity of Patricia Arquette’s Oscar-winning performance in his Boyhood. Adapting Maria Semple’s 2012 wild, reckless bestseller seems like a logical next step on that turbulent maternal highway, given that it told the story of an architect named Bernadette Fox. She’s the winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant for creating her 20-Mile House, constructed from materials sourced within 20 miles of the home. But when a tycoon bought the place and destroyed it, a crushed Bernadette retreated to Seattle, a place she riotously despises, to live in seclusion with her Microsoft-star husband and raising their teen daughter. The author fashioned her book out of letters, emails, texts, newspaper clippings, and police reports that kicked in when Bernadette went missing.

Where did she go? That’s the book and the movie. And Linklater, who charted to perfection the chaotic course of a relationship in his landmark “Before” trilogy — 1985’s Before Sunrise, 2004’s Before Sunset,  2013’s Before Midnight — should be the ideal choice to bring the novel to the screen with all its mad, crazy-quilt exuberance in place, right?

Not so, as it turns out. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, with a timid script by Linklater, Holly Gent, and Vincent Palmo Jr., reduces the book to a pedestrian run-through that never takes flight. Cate Blanchett plays Bernadette with her customary elegance, erudition, and acerbic wit, but her heroine has had her wings clipped. The narrative bumps in the book have been sanded off: Bernadette’s husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), a selfish cheater in Semple’s view, comes to the screen with his heart always in the right place. The snappiest scenes are between Bernadette and her daughter, Bee (a terrific Emma Nelson), Mom’s de facto best — and only — friend who’s nonetheless been kept in the dark about her mother’s past accomplishments. It’s Bee, soon off to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, who pushes her parents to take a family trip. Bee is studying Shackleton at school and thinks Antarctica, of all places, will nudge Mom out of her rut.

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In truth, Bernadette is hitting the breaking point, wrangling with a snob neighbor (Kristen Wiig) who falsely accuses her of running over her foot with her car. Worse, our suburbanite on the verge of a nervous breakdown has disastrously turned over the running of her life and finances to Manjula, a virtual assistant that turns out to be something far more sinister. That’s when Elgin brings in a therapist (Judy Greer) to stage an intervention, provoking Bernadette to run for her life and leave her family behind.

The conflict comes to a head in Antarctica, where Bernadette’s family goes in pursuit of her. The trip through the dangerous seas of the Drake Passage is meant to symbolize Mom’s own surging inner journey. But Linklater’s becalmed treatment of Bernadette’s crisis never leaves a doubt of smooth sailing ahead. A father to three daughters, the director has stated he sees the film as “an intense portrait of motherhood,” and he’s simply too good at what he does not to let his soulful artistry show through. But something crucial is missing. Semple’s book is also about the damage done by a career-stifled mother — not just to herself, but to her husband, daughter, neighbors, and everyone whose lives she touched. It’s the human devastation that gets short shrift in a movie that turns the hot, hilarious, out-for-blood Bernadette into the thing she hates most: conventional.

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The Where'd You Go, Bernadette Movie Leaves Out the Book's Best Bits

The screen version cut a MAJOR subplot.

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• The movie is based on Maria Semple's 2012 book —and here's how they compare.

Where'd You Go Bernadette, a new film starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, and newcomer Emma Nelson, is adapted from Maria Semple's 2012 novel of the same name . Semple's bestseller is the darkly comic tale of a highly creative yet unhappy woman who's suppressed her talent for decades and finally rediscovers it through an unlikely journey. The book is also, as the title suggests, a mystery. As in the movie, the story is mostly woven together by Bernadette's daughter, Bee, who's become the sole source of joy in her mother's life. It soon becomes clear that Bee's also the only person in Bernadette's orbit who truly understands and accepts her prior to her disappearance.

What made Where'd You Go Bernadette such a page-turner is that, not unlike one of Bernadette's infamous projects, the book is a structural wonder. It's an epistolary novel, meaning the plot unfurls through a collection of letters—or in this case, documents that include Bernadette's messages to "Manjula," the person she thinks is her India-based virtual assistant, email exchanges between judgmental moms Audrey and Soo-Lin, and Bernadette's husband Elgie's TED Talk transcript. The reader's presented with a dossier that provides what feels like rich and intimate peeks into each character's world (peeks that are interspersed with Bee's insights, and her speculation about what happened to Bernadette). Semple teases out the answer to the title's central question through nimble storytelling and pacing.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Richard Linklater's adaptation. It should be noted that turning this sprawling novel into a coherent screenplay must've been Herculean; tough choices were inevitable to avoid a relentless series of voice-overs and a five hour runtime. But in a seeming effort to reshape this story into a warmhearted dramedy, the movie version effectively deflates all of the darkness, crackling wit and suspense that made Where'd You Go, Bernadette so interesting in the first place.

The movie doesn't show enough of Elgie's TED Talk.

Bernadette's husband, Elgin Branch, is half-present in his family's life in the book. Drifting apart from his wife, he's mostly preoccupied by his workouts and his Microsoft passion project, a crazy brainwave transmitter called Samantha 2. Readers only get to know the quirky genius Bernadette must have been drawn to through a transcript of Elgie's career-making TED Talk, which showcases his product. In the movie, we see just seconds of it in a clip, underutilizing Crudup's acting skills and robbing us of a very fun book moment.

In the book, Audrey plays a much larger and more colorful role in Bernadette and Bee's story.

As fun as it was to watch Kristen Wiig pretend to get her foot run over onscreen, Audrey's role is bigger and more pivotal in Semple's book. We learn volumes about the crunchy, insular Seattle community Bernadette hates so much through Audrey's emails. Audrey rescues Bernadette from her intervention by climbing up the ladder on the side of the house; in the movie, Bernadette just runs over to knock on her door. Initially spiteful, Audrey's fall from grace is much larger in the book (and her family is forced to live in a motel after the mudslides). At the end of the book, we learn that Audrey sent Bee the lion's share of documents that make up the novel—a satisfying redemption arc for the book's biggest villain. The movie lowered the stakes by leaving all of this out.

Soo-Lin and Elgie have a baby, and an emotional affair.

This is the wildest omission from the film version of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. In the book, we get to know how petty and small-minded Soo-Lin is through her sniping emails with Audrey before she becomes Elgie's assistant and stokes his suspicions that Bernadette has lost her mind. Soo-Lin and Elgie cross professional boundaries, and Soo-Lin is instrumental in making Bernadette's intervention happen. After a one-night-stand that Elgie instantly regrets, Soo-Lin gets pregnant. Though Elgie and Bernadette ultimately reconcile, Soo-Lin does end up having Elgie's baby.

In the movie, it's somewhat clear that Soo-Lin thinks Bernadette is a snob; she develops a crush on Elgie as his assistant and insinuates her way into his life. Ultimately, though, she's just kind of...there, until she isn't.

Bee actually goes to Choate in the book.

Enamored with her parents' tales of boarding school, Bee wants to leave her Seattle school for Choate Rosemary Hall , an exclusive prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut. In the film, Bee tells her dad she doesn't want to go anymore, and that's that.

In the movie, Bee does go to Choate, which is where she receives the documents from Audrey that ultimately comprise most of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. It's a shocking reveal, and Bee winds up getting kicked out of Choate in part because she's using the documents to make an incendiary book about it all. This is the inciting event that leads Bee and Elgie to finally cruise to Antartica, and that trip is much darker and more contentious than we see in the film.

Dr. Kurtz resigns after the failed intervention in the novel.

Bernadette runs away from home when Elgie, Soo-Lin and a psychologist named Dr. Kurtz (played by Judy Greer) attempt to stage an intervention that would place Bernadette in a mental health facility. In another satisfying moment of comeuppance the movie omits, Dr. Kurtz winds up tendering a letter of resignation after the chain of events make it clear that intervention never should have happened the way it did.

The movie tells us *exactly where Bernadette went* in the very first scene.

Again, as the title indicates, Semple poses the question of where Bernadette went (and why). We don't fully learn the mystery's surprising resolution until the book is in its final act.

In the first few minutes of Linklater's movie, though, we see Cate Blanchett as Bernadette kayaking through the glaciers that reenergize her creativity at the story's end. To those who haven't read the source material, this might seem like a dream sequence or flashback—until you learn, mere moments later, that the family is planning a trip to Antartica. And even after Bernadette actually disappears, the film spends very little time on the mystery of where she got off to.

Instead of the intriguing clues Bee parses out on the page, we literally meet the scientist Bernadette is drinking Pink Penguin cocktails with Becky (Troian Bellisario) and see her head to the South Pole. The mystery is solved before it has a chance to rev up—but hey, at least we got to see the cool South Pole research station she builds.

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Samantha Vincenty is the former senior staff writer at Oprah Daily. 

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette review: Cate Blanchett can't quite save willfully quirky adaptation

The process of turning a beloved book into a movie is always a little bit of a mystery: What alchemy preserves the magic from page to screen? And why do some just get lost in translation?

Where'd You Go Bernadette is faithful in many ways to Maria Semple's bestselling 2012 novel , though its faithfulness sometimes feels like its downfall, too — a film of such determined quirk that it never quite gels as a human story.

To be fair, too, Semple's style hardly made adaptation easy; nearly all of the novel unfolds in a series of emails, letters, and official documents. Still, director Richard Linklater seems to treat her tale of a blue-mood Seattleite who goes on the lam in Antarctica as literally as he can, streamlining the narrative into a sort of contained Wes Anderson whimsy.

As the titular Bernadette, Cate Blanchett dresses like a rainy-day Anna Wintour — all sleek brown bob, sweeping trench coats, and bug-eyed sunglasses — and behaves like a sort of agoraphobic Auntie Mame.

A one-time architectural wunderkind turned slightly mad housewife, Bernadette is kooky fun when she's alone with her teenage daughter, Bee ( Emma Nelson ), but can hardly stand the company of anyone outside the family unit; even her long-suffering IT-genius husband, Elgin ( Billy Crudup ) doesn't really seem to know how to reach her anymore.

The other moms at Bee's school, particularly Kristen Wiig 's alpha den mother, Audrey, are the enemy (Bernadette calls them gnats) — but so is sleep, shopping, and pretty much all forms of socializing. The only thing she enjoys is spending time with Bee and instructing her remote personal assistant, Manjula, to execute various life tasks, from procuring fishing vests to finding prescription sleep aids strong enough to down a horse.

When a triggering incident sends her on the run, the movie moves beyond its Trials of the Northwest One Percent mode to a sort of diorama adventure of picturesque ice caps and anoraks (Bee's wish, granted for a junior-high lifetime of good behavior, was meant to be a family trip to the South Pole).

It's not quite a smooth transition, and neither is Blanchett's performance; half the time she seems to be acting for theater, a sort of mannered melancholy that verges on camp; it's only when Bernadette is really suffering that we get to see the quieter shades of her character come through.

Wiig and Crudup, and even some of the smaller cameo roles — Laurence Fishburne, Megan Mullaly, Judy Greer — reach for notes more resonant than straight satire. But Linklater, who brought such subtle, generous feeling to films like Boyhood and the Sunset trilogy, feels somehow miscast as the steward of Bernadette 's willful eccentricities.

Instead, whatever the movie has to say about what is to lose yourself to motherhood or money or middle-aged fear — or more specifically, what becomes of an artist who stops making art — stays mostly at the edges, pushed aside instead for a parade of sunglasses, wacky set pieces, and waddling, oblivious penguins. B–

Related content:

• For Cate Blanchett, adapting Where'd You Go, Bernadette was a worthwhile challenge
• How Cate Blanchett and Richard Linklater figured out Where'd You Go, Bernadette
• Author Maria Semple talks Where'd You Go, Bernadette ' book and movie

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Movie Review – Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)

August 16, 2019 by Robert Kojder

Where’d You Go, Bernadette , 2019.

Directed by Richard Linklater. Starring Cate Blanchett, Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne, Troian Bellisario, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, James Urbaniak, Claudia Doumit, Kate Easton, Lana Young, Zoe Chao, Megan Mullally, and Steve Zahn.

A loving mom becomes compelled to reconnect with her creative passions after years of sacrificing herself for her family. Her leap of faith takes her on an epic adventure that jump-starts her life and leads to her triumphant rediscovery.

It would be easy to say that the tone for Where’d You Go, Bernadette is all over the place, but its main issue stems from something much more specific, namely the performance from Cate Blanchett. Directed by the revered Richard Linklater (also serving as a co-writer adapting the likely much better novel from Maria Semple), the talented but unsuccessful architect Bernadette Fox has a cocktail of mental problems ranging from extremely antisocial behavior, anxiety, medication abuse, manic depression, and more manifesting all of these into terrible behavior usually aimed at her neighbors but sometimes her own family, especially her husband Elgie (Billy Crudup). She overdresses complete with scarves and large sunglasses as not to be recognized in public, also with wacky accessories like a fishing vest (she is trying to mentally prepare for a vacation to Antarctica with her family as a reward for her daughter), she’s fidgety during conversation, she doesn’t make much eye contact, she tries to find humor in inappropriate situations, and her attitude is growing more self-destructive by the day.

Now, none of this sounds ripe for a comedic performance, yet that’s how Cate Blanchett is treating this material, whether it be of her own free will and interpretation of the protagonist from the novel or under Richard Linklater’s direction. Her very real mental problems are not necessarily treated as a joke or for a punchline, but rather to give this character an offbeat amusing tone that lands almost no laughs. There’s a moment during a family birthday celebration during a restaurant where, after numerous scenes that awkwardly suggest the audience should supposedly be chuckling at the antics of Bernadette, her husband Elgie starts up a difficult conversation expressing his concern over her mental well-being. It’s the closest this movie ever comes to evoking empathy (alongside an intervention segment that is well-staged and acted). We may not like Bernadette (and anyone that does relate to her might also require therapy), but we do want to see her get healthier.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a misguided disaster that suffers more from none of the writers actually understanding mental health stigmas rather than something broader like a poorly written female lead. Following the intervention, which by the way doesn’t even occur until over halfway into the movie, Bernadette runs away. It’s obvious where she is going and why, making the title of the film more misleading than anything, and it’s never really a question of will or won’t husband and daughter ever find her. This portion of the film also isn’t engaging or exciting, but that’s the least of its problems. Without necessarily giving away the ending, the narrative here suggests that Bernadette does not actually have mental problems, instead, saying that she is an artist that needs to create to find happiness. This movie is such a crock of shit that it’s both insulting to people that really do have mental problems and artists.

However, even that’s not the most offensive aspect of the movie. Bernadette has a teenage daughter played by newcomer Emma Nelson (the Illinois located actress also delivers the best performance in the movie and will hopefully receive more work for giving her best efforts to salvage this mess) that sort of takes the wrong lessons from everything going on. She’s the first one to defend her mom over anything even when it’s the wrong thing to do. It’s natural why she does this, and her unwavering love for her mother and ability to not see the bad (alongside the bad that her mother’s behavior is transferring to her) does add a little more complexity to the story. Bee is by far the only interesting character here, and seeing as the majority of the movie is narrated by her spouting off all kinds of different scientific facts (she’s a supremely intelligent child), I’m willing to bet that the entire novel or most of it comes from her perspective. Perhaps if the film adaptation followed suit, it too would function properly. As is, the focus is on Bernadette with Cate Blanchett turning in a wildly miscalculated performance that sinks the movie, yet is somehow also only a fraction of the issues here.

Richard Linklater has also populated Where’d You Go, Bernadette with a number of supporting characters filled in by some of his regular actors, except their scenes largely exist as extended exposition dumps explaining the wins and losses of Bernadette’s architecture career and what may have triggered her downward spiral. Among that, there’s also a line about Bernadette having four miscarriages that are never once brought up again; it’s the kind of garbage the script pulls trying to get viewers to care about, relate, or simply find empathy for Bernadette’s struggles as there’s no other way to make her presence tolerable. The movie itself is not tolerable.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, friend me on Facebook, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , check out my personal non-Flickering Myth affiliated  Patreon , or email me at [email protected]

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“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” Reviewed: Richard Linklater’s Narrow View of a Creator in Crisis

By Richard Brody

The 2012 book “ Where’d You Go, Bernadette ,” by Maria Semple, is a documentary novel in the same way that other novels would be called epistolary: though it has a bit of narration from the protagonist’s teen-age daughter, Bee, the story is told mainly through a collection of (fictional) archival materials, such as e-mails, letters, faxes, legal and medical transcripts, text messages, PDFs, and financial documents. For his film adaptation of the book , the director Richard Linklater extracts and stages the events that the documents describe, only occasionally preserving traces of Semple’s devices. The movie is at its best when those traces are most conspicuous. The rest of the time, Linklater (who co-wrote the script with Holly Gent and Vince Palmo) turns a complex story simple; worse, he turns the protagonist’s complex mind simple, and misses the chance to transcend the novel’s givens and explore their alluring implications. Its narrowed substance is virtually guaranteed by its narrow artistic preconceptions.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the movie, is the story of Bernadette Fox, a woman in her fifties who lives in Seattle with her husband, Elgin Branch (Billy Crudup), called Elgie, and their daughter, Balakrishna, called Bee (Emma Nelson), a high-school student. Bernadette struggles to get through her days. She’s somewhat agoraphobic and somewhat misanthropic. She’s contemptuous of the other parents at Bee’s school (“gnats,” she calls them), and her most meaningful daytime interaction occurs online, with Manjula, her so-called personal assistant, who is based in India. Bernadette spends much time at home, doing little; she emerges mainly to drop Bee off and pick her up, and to get into squabbles with the family’s next-door neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig).

So it has been for Bernadette, apparently, for nearly twenty years. She was an acclaimed and admired architect and a MacArthur award-winner, who, after a calamity—the demolition of her best-known building by an arrogant TV star—relocated from Los Angeles to Seattle with Elgie, a visionary engineer who’d been hired by Microsoft. They moved into a large, ramshackle old house, and Bernadette withdrew from architecture and, seemingly, from society, but is deeply devoted to her family and passionately involved in raising Bee. The mother-daughter relationship is very close, all the more so because Elgie’s work involves long hours and frequent travel. Now the family, at Bee’s behest, is planning a trip to Antarctica. Meanwhile, a new series of local mishaps—and also the revelation of an unintended but major misstep on Bernadette’s part—drives Bernadette into a suddenly deeper crisis, and she takes the trip on her own, leaving Elgie and Bee to chase after her and to attempt to reckon with her needs, desires, and frustrations as, in that distinctive new environment, she rekindles her bold architectural ambitions.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is the story of a woman with two big problems. One is that she has suffered a traumatic blow to her creative life; the other is mental illness. Bernadette is depicted as both a hoarder of prescription medicines and a chronic insomniac with high levels of anxiety. One of the key twists in the plot is her effort to get a powerful psychotropic drug from a local pharmacy—after which Elgie, happening to pass the storefront at that moment, finds her sprawled out on the store’s couch. As for her misanthropy, it’s explicitly linked to her abandonment of architecture, as depicted in a scene with her former mentor, Paul Jellinek (Laurence Fishburne), who tells her, point-blank, “People like you must create. If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.”

Yet these two long-term matters converge in an apparent third one, which only briefly comes to the surface: Elgie’s blithe and industrious ignorance of Bernadette’s state of mind, his cavalier indifference to her well-being in the course of the past twenty years. 2019 is the cinematic year of callous men, as found in the horror movie “ Midsommar ” and the horror comedy “ Ready or Not .” “Bernadette” isn’t a horror movie, but it presents a moral horror: the household is kept running, Bee is admirably maturing, and so, overlooking Bernadette’s struggles, Elgie has kept going, with a shrug, on his own high-flying arc of admiration and success.

Yet the movie elides more or less all of the substance in this backstory, leaving the central relationship of the film, the marital one, utterly opaque. Instead, Linklater foregrounds the action that precipitates Bernadette’s departure for Antarctica and the intrepid adventures of self-rediscovery that she undertakes there. The drama starts not just in media res but nearly at its end; it’s like a platform that, with so small a foundation, is supported only by tricks, by effortful effects. The main one is the energy expended by the actors, whose fervor is both impressive and depressing: the actors are forced to do the work that Linklater doesn’t devote to developing the story or characters.

The movie bursts into glory when Blanchett is front and center, not fitting Bernadette into the jigsaw puzzle of the plot but giving the character’s voice and mind free rein. Bernadette’s interactions with Manjula occur by e-mail—but Bernadette generates her own side of the correspondence by voice, pacing and strutting around at home while speaking floridly to her cell-phone’s transcriber. Here, Blanchett conjures a torrent of verbal power and frenetic energy, and these grand solos do more than let Blanchett shine; they let Bernadette shine, which makes it all the more of a shame when they’re cut short and shaped to lock into the movie’s rigid plot. There’s a noteworthy montage sequence, of Bernadette’s reunion, in a café, with Paul (intercut with Elgie speaking of her to a therapist, played by Judy Greer), in which Bernadette’s inner life, embodied in Blanchett’s sharply etched voice, presses again to the fore, but only just so.

Linklater seems uneasy presenting Bernadette as possessed of any ideas at all. The character’s lack of intellectual substance parallels the movie’s simplified, straightened-out narrative. Linklater’s apparent assumptions about what a movie, or a popular movie, is—active, straightforward, plain, and untroubling—work against his protagonist, who is anything but. There’s a hint that she hasn’t shut down her aesthetic sense, when she’s shown strolling through the Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas. But this, too, is a mere check box of a scene, serving mainly to display her aversion to human contact, when a fan of her work recognizes her there.

Linklater is a filmmaker of moral uplift, and in his best movies (such as “ Bernie ,” “ Everybody Wants Some!! ,” “Fast Food Nation,” and even “School of Rock”) the devilish temptations remain present and alluring and even not-quite-vanquished despite his protagonists’ best efforts. “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is a story of uplift à trois or more, and the destructive force that sets the tale in motion is even named explicitly in the course of the action: it’s the demon that takes over the creator when the creator isn’t creating. It’s a facile and reductive view of a character who, in the novel, is tormented by a force beyond creative crisis or mental illness. In Semple’s depiction, Bernadette is more than just crabby and eloquently viper-tongued; she’s possessed by a sociopolitical bitterness, as well. She’s repeatedly dismissive of what she considers Seattle’s touchy-feely liberalism; she derides local fervent Christians as “Jesus freaks”; she mocks Canadians for not recognizing “that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.” The book doesn’t go further in probing Bernadette’s intellectual life—her artistic ideals, her political principles, and their connection. Could she be the Howard Roark , the Randroid, the libertarian tough-it-out cowpuncher of localist architects? Linklater, had he freed up the movie’s structure, could also have freed up Bernadette’s spirit.

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By Maya Phillips

By Anthony Lane

‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ Review: Richard Linklater Concocts a Messy Character Study

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“Nobody knows anybody. Not that well,” is a repeated cynical utterance in the Coen Brothers ’ 1990 classic Miller’s Crossing . It’s also a line that applies to the far more upbeat Where’d You Go, Bernadette . The film’s plotting is kind of a mess as it meanders around, but once you accept Richard Linklater ’s latest as a character study of a woman who feels stunted by her home life, the picture starts to work a bit better. Unfortunately, Bernadette still has to churn through plot beats that are limp at best and convoluted at worst, but at least the core of the movie—who Bernadette is, what she’s been through, and what she wants—connect thanks to Cate Blanchett ’s performance and Linklater’s empathy for the character. Where’d You Go, Bernadette is at its most rewarding when it shows that it’s a fool’s errand to think you have someone figured when it’s so hard to know ourselves.

Bernadette Fox (Blanchett) was an acclaimed architect who decided to go live in Seattle with her tech genius husband Elgie ( Billy Crudup ), and while she doesn’t really seem to get along with anyone outside her family, she loves her husband and is devoted to her spirited daughter Bee ( Emma Nelson ). When Bee decides that the family should visit Antarctica, Bernadette and Elgie reluctantly agree, but the decision soon sends the anti-social Bernadette spiraling, which is made worse by her overbearing neighbor Audrey ( Kristen Wiig ). Feeling both isolated and trapped, Bernadette struggles to reclaim her individuality without losing her family.

I love some of the ideas presented in Where’d You Go, Bernadette . It’s a story where you can see that Linklater really connects to his protagonist because she’s stuck in a situation where she no longer creates, and that becomes a kind of living death for a creative person. Linklater is one of our more creative filmmakers who always tries to push himself and find different stories to tell. Although Bernadette’s backstory is told inelegantly (we basically get all of it from a documentary on YouTube or through exposition), it at least makes clear that the reason Bernadette lives in a dilapidated house is that it reflects her inner turmoil. She made the decision to devote herself to her family, but that choice came with a serious cost to her individual creative fulfillment. The vines literally coming out through the floor and the water coming in from the ceiling represent both how Bernadette has creatively gone to seed and her need to break out from the confines of her mundane existence.

However, Linklater withholds any information about Bernadette’s backstory for a solid thirty minutes, so you’re left wondering why we should care about Bernadette or what kind of conflict she’s facing. The first act leads us to believe that Bernadette is just a tough customer. She’s prickly, anti-social, introverted, and doesn’t seem to really care about anyone other than her husband and daughter. You can see why she’s the bane of the extroverted, rule-oriented Aubrey, but it’s not until Linklater starts peeling back the layers of his characters’ lives that you really start to understand them. Granted, this usually comes in the form of people just telling you who they are, which is clumsy and clunky storytelling, but at least it coheres into an interesting subtext.

The big problem with the film is how haphazardly it feels cobbled together. The movie is adapted from Maria Semple ’s novel, which is told through the form of documents cobbled together by Bee. That’s tough to adapt, and so Linklater just streamlines Bernadette’s story chronologically rather than making it a mystery of what happened to her. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that the film still doesn’t really cohere into a gripping narrative. What works here are the characters while the narrative twists and turns feel like jarring moments that don’t make a lot of sense beyond needing to propel Bernadette in a new direction.

I like the idea of Where’d You Go, Bernadette more than I like the actual film. I like a story that explores the secrets we keep from each other and how our inability to acknowledge what’s making us unhappy only makes us unhappier. The melancholy core of the movie contrasts nicely with Linklater’s upbeat tone, and the cast is terrific. But the pacing of the storytelling feels timid and afraid to match its protagonist’s aggressive personality. The irony of Where’d You Go, Bernadette is that it’s a movie about how people don’t know each other well enough, and in the end, it seems like Linklater didn’t quite know his protagonist well enough to tell her story effectively.

• Cate Blanchett

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run. This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run. This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run.

• Adil El Arbi
• Bilall Fallah
• Chris Bremner
• George Gallo
• Martin Lawrence
• Vanessa Hudgens
• 149 User reviews
• 136 Critic reviews
• 54 Metascore

• Mike Lowrey

• Marcus Burnett

• (as Paola Nuñez)

• Captain Howard

• (as Khaled 'DJ Khaled' Khaled)

• (as Dennis Mcdonald)

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Michael Bay : the director of Bad Boys (1995) and Bad Boys II (2003) appears as as an irked driver. He's shown driving a black 1990s 964 Porsche 911 Turbo, the same car Mike Lowrey drove in Bad Boys (1995) .
• Goofs When Marcus is on the hospital roof in nothing but a gown, the sign on the adjacent building says that it's a Grand Hyatt hotel. Miami doesn't have a Grand Hyatt, but the one shown is in Atlanta, a sign that most of the movie was filmed there.

[Marcus confronts an alligator]

Marcus Burnett : Begone, gator. I rebuke you!

[the alligator backs away]

Marcus Burnett : See, Mike, that's how you command the universe.

[the alligator attacks Marcus]

Marcus Burnett : That motherfucker racist, Mike! That motherfucker racist!

• Connections Featured in Black Eyed Peas & El Alfa Feat. Becky G: Tonight (2024)
• Soundtracks OH NO performed by BIA

User reviews 149

• essens-35641
• Jun 8, 2024
• When was Bad Boys: Ride or Die released? Powered by Alexa
• Why is Theresa Randle not returning in this film?
• June 7, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Official Site
• Những Gã Trai Hư: Chơi Hay Bị Xơi
• Columbia Pictures
• Jerry Bruckheimer Films
• Westbrook Studios
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $62,745,171
• $56,527,324
• Jun 9, 2024
• $113,656,295

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 55 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Atmos

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