WHERE’D YOU GO BERNADETTE? A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN
In Where’d You Go Bernadette, Cate Blanchett plays a woman who has lost her personal mission in life after becoming a mother. Although she was formerly a super-star architect who won a MacArthur Genius Award, she has slipped into becoming, over the years, her teenage daughter’s “‘best friend” and chauffeur in a baffling relationship that will be unfamiliar to 99% of today’s mothers. Making this even more difficult to fathom is the slavish imitation of Anna Wintour in Ms. Blanchett’s hairdo, sunglasses and even the name Bea for her daughter. We look at Bernadette thru the lens of that other highly successful career woman and wonder what the director had in mind. Did he think the screenplay was insufficient to remind us of whom Bernadette was meant to be without showing us an image of one of the most photographed working women in the world?
This is a bewildering movie directed by Richard Linklater whose previous films, including “Before Sunrise”, showed great sensitivity to the subtle nuances of male/female relationships. In this film, we are meant to believe that a highly creative man in his own right never noticed that his highly creative wife had stopped doing anything for at least 14 years. Though we see or are told that she seldom leaves her house, has no friends, doesn’t sleep, alienates people (including her husband) and has refused any sort of help, we are also supposed to accept that all she needed to finally recharge her batteries was an aha moment along with the miraculous good fortune of meeting the right person at the right time while paddling through the waters of Antarctica.
So this is essentially a fairy tale not about Saint Bernadette who had 18 visions, but about a fairy queen struck by a magic wand that eclipsed all distances and unlikely occurrences to restore her royal crown. And since this is a fairy tale, the abusive neighbor next door, played reliably by Kristen Wiig, becomes the tunnel to freedom that Bernadette needed for her escape to wholeness so that all would be right in the kingdom of Utopia, a word that literally means nowhere.
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