UNDERSTANDING BERNADETTE
Hanging between impostor syndrome and bibliophile, I decided to watch Where’d you go, Bernadette with many aspirations to have an after-introspection session with myself.
Released in 2019, starring the iconic Cate Blanchett, this movie is based on Maria Sample’s novel of the same name, which was published in 2012. Being an epistolary novel of the comedy genre, Where’d you go, Bernadette tells a story of a highly creative and passionate woman who is restarting her career after a decade-long halt.
The angle of ‘creative genuinity’ and the dilemma of being overpowering critical of “who you are” as well as “why you are” has always been the kickstarter of becoming the main character energy in a movie. But, the question lingers around the adapted movies, if you draw out a comparison, especially if you place the bet on the stream of consciousness.
Calling dibs on the love-hate ratio, both the novel and movie have received an absolute face-off polarity; it’s either an absolute love or complete deglazing dislike. According to online reviews, this movie has an average performance rating. As Oprah Daily stated in The Where’d You Go, Bernadette Movie Leaves Out the Book’s Best Bits, Linklater’s adaptation version “deflates all of the darkness, crackling wit and suspense that made Where’d You Go, Bernadette so interesting in the first place”, it goes without much ado that the plot of the movie falls flat and lacking a mystical impulse for the audience to retaliate their composure onto their seats. But this should partially be borne by the shoulders of bookworms who have already read sample. For first-timers, being introduced to Bernadetteverse on the silver screen, the cake should be sliced with an open mind.
Take it from a personal note, I went with binge mode before nerd mode. Pulling back the curiosity lenses on ratings, digging straight, Bernadette’s isotropic identity is being a mother to 15-year-old Bee, who is optimistically the narrator of the story. But, her best wardrobe identity is a former successful architect. This mother-daughter duo is a layered interpretation of contrasting states as Bernadette Fox’s MacArthur Grant accreditation and her transition to motherhood set the tone of Bee’s search for her. More so, it proves the chaotic and ill-equipped who once was a Stargirl of the architectural world righteous for her privileges, luxury and being able to afford a trip to Antarctica for her daughter.
Growing up through her mother’s mental issues and creative crisis, and her father’s indulgence in his career, she is Bernadette’s best friend in the true sense.
What becomes an insightful squeeze to this adaptation vs movie saga is how the book gives more of a satirical vibe with some in my feelings drizzles, whereas the movie has a conflicting or a clear confusing motion which results in a comedy. Although the pursuit of finding yourself again is a glorious act of existence, Linklater’s version of Bernadette Fox is in blunt pieces, lacking the intermittent force to connect.
As stated by The New Yorker, “Bernadette” isn’t a horror movie, but it presents a moral horror: the household is kept running, Bee is admirably maturing, and, so, overlooking Bernadette’s struggles, Elgie has kept going, with a shrug, on his own high-flying arc of admiration and success.”, there is a struggle, a tug of war, the urge that only creative minds would relate, but if we put together the personality arc of Bernadette, it is quite apparent that her most nerve-racking pitfall is mental friction, of detachment from her element, the sense of abandonment from being at her best, and the constant failure to acknowledge the reality of her situation.
In one of the scenes, Paul Jellinck, who is an ex-mentor, tells Bernadette, straight-forwardly: “People like you must create. If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.”. This quote can single-handedly establish the cause and effect of the intellectual dilemma of a creative person; and of Bernadette Fox.
Is it the Ted Talk, Elgin’s one-on-one with Dr. Janelle Kurtz, a shrink, or Bernadette’s piles of pills that signals the casualty of being Bernadette, a woman in her fifties, who runs off to a distant continent to trace her footnotes back?
Perhaps, it’s Bee, who interprets and assembles her mother’s disposition as her mother is deconstructing her existence, both in a parallel dimension. Conclusively, this movie has two female protagonists, with different temperaments and different approaches to uplift, shape and redistribute the broken pieces.
And, perhaps, it’s not the pursuit, but the idea of pursuit which defines what Bernadettes of the world have to go through in the long run, even when the prologue is not that impressive.
