Where’d You Go, Bernadette

In adapting Maria Semple’s popular novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, writer/director Richard Linklater (Boyhood) has crafted a film of unusual form that encompasses the book’s quirkiness without attempting to imitate it. A once-famous architect turned stay-at-home mom, Bernadette is erratic, eccentric and thoroughly entertaining. Whether she’s also unbalanced is the movie’s central question.

In the title role, Cate Blanchett may be one of the few actors who could hold together Linklater’s vision for a movie that’s part farce, part intervention, part melodrama. Bernadette’s husband, Elgie, is played by Billy Crudup in the sensitive straight guy mode he perfected in 20th Century Women, while newcomer Emma Nelson is a charmer as Bee, their daughter (and our narrator), handling her big confrontation with a stuck-up neighbor (Kristen Wiig) with aplomb.

The actual plot would sound either mad or dull in summary, so suffice it to say that Bernadette is a larger-than-life mom who faces a crisis and disappears. She winds up in Antarctica, images of which add a sort of spiritual dimension to the movie. The plot, though, is not the point. The joy of Bernadette is Blanchett digging into another complicated, brilliant, insecure character — and, really, isn’t that enough? If not, there are cameos from a host of other fine actors such as Megan Mullally, Lawrence Fishburne and the ever underused Judy Greer.

It’s not quite a shaggy dog story, but any movie that encompasses tech culture and penguin-mating practices is bound to seem somewhat scattered. Still, some of the best film journeys take viewers on seemingly capricious itineraries toward a satisfying if unexpected destination. In Bernadette, the endpoint is a message about the inexplicability of creativity — a subject entirely appropriate to its oddball narrative.