Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2020) - Movie Review

Richard Linklater has a real fascination with using cinema to capture life’s little moments as they happen. This will come as zero shock to those who witnessed the media hypestorm surrounding Boyhood a few years back, but a lot of his oeuvre shows this in one way or another. Whether it’s musing on bygone days, focusing on a single character’s need to break out of those bygone days, or literally following the same characters/cast over several in-real-time years to bridge reality and cinema closer, it’s an aesthetic that has led to some great work. With his latest, though, I find myself questioning whether this particular moment was worth making holy.

And that’s nothing to do with the subject matter itself, nor how it manifests through Cate Blanchett’s lead performance. I find it difficult to believe that, for those who choose to watch this, anyone will walk away thinking ill of Blanchett’s turn as the titular Bernadette. She captures a certain incessant watchability in just how abrasive she is, similar to her work in Blue Jasmine, openly describing herself as a “menace to society” through her emphatically antisocial behaviour.

Said behaviour is shown, in quite unnerving fashion, to be the result of Bernadette’s lack of artistic activity. Stagnation that gave way to a form of contempt against… pretty much everyone and everything, herself included. It’s an interesting approach to her architectural profession, and a sentiment that is very relatable these days, but where it really hits home is how it aligns with her psychological state, both as her own person and as a mother.

It feels like a natural extension to Patricia Arquette’s show-stealing monologue in Boyhood, crystalising the adjustment mothers make to be caregivers and how it can feel like being robbed of your own personage. It’s because of this that the scenes between Blanchett and newcomer Emma Nelson as her daughter Bee are so damn effecting… that, and having a whole scene devoted to yelling at Kristen Wiig helps too.

And on that note, we get into the entertainment value… and outside of Blanchett, it’s honestly pretty dry. Not even dry humour, just… dry. As a mystery, the title comes across like an absurdist joke since Bernadette never leaves the film’s focus and takes up most of the screen-time. Hell, her disappearance itself, the result of a pretty major emotional breakdown, feels a bit thrown together once we get to it. Along with the entire third act wrapped around it. And as comedy-drama… well, it got the latter part down, but it only ends up tickling the notion of actually laughing at what’s going on, like all the personnel on an Antarctic science station who took up different trades just so they could be there, but it never ends up connecting as it should.

As a character study about a working mother, this is remarkably engaging and complex in how it details what makes her tick, amplified exponentially by Blanchett’s performance. As a look at where motherhood, mental health, and artistic expression intersect and influence each other, it definitely appeals to the part of me that’s fascinated by artists describing other artists. But that might go to explain why Blanchett herself takes up so much space in the narrative, as anything that isn’t her (both in-front of and behind the camera) ends up dragging to a rather disappointing degree. It’s genuinely bizarre to see a film that is anchored by a performance this fucking good, and yet still feel quite underwhelmed by the whole thing.