Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, and Laurence Fishburne
Distributor: Universal Pictures International
Runtime: 109 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2020

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Rating notes: Mature themes and coarse language

This American drama is based on a screenplay written by the film’s Director (Richard Linklater) and others, which was based in turn on a best-selling novel of the same name, authored by Maria Semple in 2012. It tells the story of a middle-aged woman, who reconnects with her professional past, after choosing to sacrifice her creative skills for the sake of her family.

Once a successful architect, who no longer practices, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett) settles down with her high-tech husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), and teenage daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), in Seattle, USA. Seattle is a city Bernadette doesn’t really like. She maintains a very close relationship with her daughter, but isolates herself from the community around her, which includes the parents of children at her daughter’s school, and demanding neighbours, such as next door neighbour, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). Parents, neighbours and her (frequently) travelling husband find her aloof, and her conflicts are exacerbated by the advice of her former mentor, Paul (Laurence Fishburne) that she should make sure she stays alive creatively. It will be at her peril, he says, if she can’t.  Bernadette feels deeply about her most creatively designed house being bulldozed into rubble, when she was a successful architect, long ago.

Bee indicates she wants a holiday family trip to Antartica to reward her for good school grades, but she is especially anxious about her mother’s response. Bernadette agrees reluctantly, but slips into panic mode, unable to cope, and quickly goes into mental decline. Also, she has unwittingly involved herself in a Russian criminal operation, which plans to use personal information to defraud her and her family. The situation stresses Bernadette and her husband, and the interlude with international conspiracy exacerbates her existing psychological problems.

Conscious of her erratic behaviour, Elgin pleads with Bernadette to enter hospital for treatment. She refuses and he arranges for psychological help from a therapist (Judy Greer), but Bernadette escapes and takes refuge with Audrey, who befriends her. Audrey helps her flee to Antartica, and her husband and daughter pursue her. With the threat from Russia gone, Antartica awakens Bernadette’s creative spirit, and Bernadette expresses her desire to join a research team on a five-week trip to the South Pole as the team’s chief architect. Realising that she has rediscovered a long lost passion, Elgin and Bee reunite with her and let her go with their blessing.

Reflecting Maria Semple’s original work, the themes of the movie are various. They encompass frustrated creativity, parental dedication, the strains of motherhood, marital discord (combined with new-found togetherness), mystery intrigue, mental illness, comedy, and family tensions. Its narrative has pulling power, but cinematically it is a hard ask to address all these themes well, and it challenges both Director and Actors. Linklater and Blanchett try their best, but only partially succeed in overcoming the complexity of the plot-line and the constant threat of revealed  vulnerability. Blanchett characteristically expresses the subtle changes that indicate the artistic energy that once characterised her past as an award-winning architect, and she impressively conveys the threat to her lost creativity by mental illness. Left to herself – and there is a lot of that in this movie – Blanchett shines to earn her Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress, but the film’s multiple themes carry her performance almost to excess. The movie contains strong messages of family togetherness and perseverance, but it needed more development of the character of a talented woman, suffering the frustrations of thwarted, creative ambition.

There are good satirical touches to the film, especially when it addresses affluent American Society, but the impact of the satire weakens as the going gets tough. The film descends into sentimentality as it moves from an emotional family drama mixed with international intrigue, to a story of freshly awakened professional ambition. The movie has been described as “an intense portrait of motherhood” (which it is, now and again), but Bernadette’s journey is complex.

Peter W Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting