Movies
She Went South
Cate Blanchett gives a performance worth following in the contrived but moving Where’d You Go, Bernadette. By André Hereford
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HERE THE GREAT CATE BLANCHETT GOES, GENERALLY ADVENTURE promises to follow, even if the vehicle is the lukewarm, late-summer dramedy Where’d You Go, Bernadette. The Oscar-winning Aussie consistently inhabits every role she undertakes with tremendous force and, paradoxically, abandon. If she believes in the journey of the person she’s portraying, the audience most likely will believe, too. That movie star magnetism didn’t necessarily sell Blanchett’s crystal skull-wielding Soviet agent in the Spielberg sequel that shall not be named, but her committed performance is practically enough to make an audience believe in Where’d You Go, Bernadette (HHHHH), based on the 2012 best-seller by Maria Semple. As well-to-do Seattle wife, mom, and relative recluse Bernadette Fox, Blanchett channels a woman spiraling slowly, then all too quickly, towards emotional and social breakdown. Swooping around as the pushiest parent at the private school attended by daughter Bee (Emma Nelson), Bernadette has allowed her gumption to curdle into abrasiveness. A former wunderkind architect who retreated utterly from her professional life, she might be suffering some form of social anxiety, or it might be a case of that vague, psychic fatigue that often plagues the bright but unfulfilled heroines of these cinematic Eat, Pray, Love excursions. Directed by Richard Linklater, Bernadette snuggles into place within a fairly reliable sub-genre, traceable past — Eat, Pray, Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, How Stella Got Her Groove Back to at least as far back as the 1989 hit Shirley Valentine. Call them “Mom’s last hurrah before the school year starts,” and pencil one in for August, or to drift down with the autumn leaves, to chart the creative and/or sexual awakening of a woman of
experience, who’s just been feeling constricted lately. Of course, “Mom’s last hurrah” movies aren’t just for moms, they’re for all of us — although uncommunicative husbands and boyfriends might not feel so well-represented by the genre. Bernadette’s neglectful spouse is tech wizard Elgie (played by aging-likefine-wine Billy Crudup), a Microsoft bigwig who seems distracted but not uncaring. The couple’s failures to connect are depicted with deft simplicity in one well-acted sequence cross-cutting between Bernadette and Elgie’s very different assessments of the twenty years they’ve lived in Seattle. At other times, their malaise seems based on the sort of contrived movie misunderstandings that normal adults could clear up in a few sentences. Linklater, who co-wrote the script with Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, awkwardly intersperses chilly, dramatic scenes of Bernadette and Elgie’s marital discord among scenes of her more comedic clashes with the snooty moms at Bee’s school, led by next-door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig). Blanchett and Wiig, performers with very different acting styles, are an odd-couple onscreen pairing that oddly works. The
AUGUST 15, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM
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