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.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” can be described as a slow sleepy trip of a movie. It follows Cate Blanchett who plays this brooding and moody architect trapped in her life she has created, using it as a place to hide from herself. The story takes place in what seems to be an everlasting downpour inside of Seattle. The mood matches Bernadette in every way, glum but powerful, grey, slow and powerful; an immovable force of nature.
There is a start to this story but it really doesn’t start. It just creeps forward from a place that seems to be randomly picked. Bernadette, her daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and Bernadette’s husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup) all start to talk about wanting to go to Antarctica. At first, the idea seems plausible coming from Bee but as the story progresses and you get a sense of the character that the daughter is, it seems less plausible. The character is a simple plot point and besides showing her deep love for her mother, is a bland stand-in for a signpost that is supposed to move the story forward and point the audience in the right emotional direction.
Antarctica is a prison break for Bernadette but she doesn’t realize it until the final act of the film. It starts as something she wants to hide from, just as she does everything in her life and turns into the key to finding herself again. It takes a moment for Bernadette to really find what excites her again and once she does, that is where this film shines. It portrays, quite perfectly, what it is like to be lost and then find what you’ve been missing. Bernadette is still broody, she is still sad but in the end, she finds something that, with the help of her family, lets her push through the sadness quite fearlessly.
Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital November 26th
