Where'd You Go, Bernadette?: Neon NZ Film Review

With a haughty Cate Blanchett and a meandering script, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? feels like an opportunity weirdly squandered.

Blanchett is former superstar architect Bernadette Fox, who disappeared after having potential to turn the designing world upside down. Settled in with her husband Elgin, (Crudup, amiable and occasionally over-looked) and their daughter Bee (Nelson in a standout performance for a newcomer), Bernadette is overwhelmed when her daughter requests a trip to Antarctica as a reward.

Already brittle and disinterested in any connection with neighbours or friends, Bernadette is disaffected by the "banality of life". With a work-obsessed husband and a fussing daughter, things reach a crescendo and she disappears when the FBI shows up after she inadvertently floods a neighbour's house with mud....

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a film that would be nothing without Blanchett's penchant for haughtiness. She's the best thing in the somewhat muddled narrative that veers through indifference to everyone's condition to a screwball farce that clearly aims to bring down some of the more WASPish neighbours and concerns.

There are moments of humour as Blanchett's growing weariness with everyone becomes acerbic and fraught, but Linklater's meandering approach to the story means the audience becomes as disaffected as Bernadette herself.

Equally, a series of cameos from a YouTube video should have been left on the cutting room floor, or beefed up to be more amusing and ludicrous as Bernadette rediscovers her passion.

Unable to decide upon a tone, and stuck with an indifference in the plot, Where'd Do You Go, Bernadette? really only thrives on Blanchett and her alone - other characters have little to no resolution in their arcs as the plot goes toward lunacy and relatively unearned heartwarming sentiment.