Where’d you go Richard Linklater? The homegrown Texan auteur known for such critical darlings as Boyhood, Dazed and Confused and the Before Trilogy as well as commercial hits like School of Rock and Bad News Bears has always been a bit of a wild card when it comes to what kind of movie he’ll spit out next but his choices have always been interesting, often experimental, and always gifted with some kind of personal touch, all elements that are almost entirely absent from his latest film, Where’d You Go Bernadette, a befuddling trainwreck of a movie and the worst film of 2019.

Adapted from the 2012 novel of the same name from author Maria Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette is a movie lost in translation. The novel’s shape is one that’s particularly hard to adapt, a collection of emails, memos, and transcripts that coalesce into a larger narrative. Punctuated with narration from the protagonist’s precocious daughter, the film tries and fails to convert its literary style to film terms, often relying on voiceover narration, interviews and YouTube videos to explain critical emotional circumstance and plot footholds in the story. A movie that makes you throw up your arms in disbelief on a regular interval, the pacing shifts from turgid to rapid-fire, and the characters are two-dimensional shadows, devoid of any semblance of real inner spark. This simply is not how humans respond to events and no amount of silly score is going to distract from that fact.

The comedy-mystery (one that isn’t funny and has not but a shred of mystery) focuses on an agoraphobic and misanthropic architect named Bernadette Fox. A once-respected firecracker in her industry, Bernadette has become a testy lock-in. Reclusive in an unceasingly rain-drenched Seattle, a city she complains about for myriad reasons, Bernadette simply hates most things. None too popular with the local moms, her only meaningful relationship is shared with her gifted and understanding daughter Bee (Emma Nelson, hacky and flat out bad in the role). Cate Blanchett plays the titular character with her usual aplomb but because of the films’ basic structural failure and abundant scripting issues, what could have been a prickly and eccentric performance reads as desperate to relate and flailing, utterly disconnected, even from itself.Bernadette as a character is simply out to sea; her decisions often don’t make much emotional sense, her various grudges against the world rarely provided much context, and she pivots from cold-hearted misanthrope to understanding though misunderstood without any hint of emotional catalyst driving the change. Her personality wavers depending on the scene, and I can only imagine the sloppy just-do-your-best efforts taking place in the editing room, desperately trying to make sense of a conflicted character that the story fails to bring to life in anything close to convincing manner. Blanchett gives the role all she’s got but in the context of this capricious and broken narrative, it is far from enough to make any of it work.

Comparing basic plot points from the novel’s Wikipedia page to what transpires in the film, it seems that the screenplay, written by Linklater, and partners Holly Gent and Vince Palmo (who previously collaborated for Me and Orson Welles), borrows many of the major plot points while also making major changes to the source material. The result is awkward at best and downright pitiful at worst. There is an infidelity undercurrent acted upon in the novel that doesn’t exist in the film, and yet all the subtext of a cheating husband still pulses within the framework of Bernadette’s saga. There are betrayals that occur that are swept under the rug and characters who are fierce enemies befriend one another without any attempt at real reconciliation.

Where’d You Go Bernadette is what happens when you try to mix chemicals with a blindfold on and the results are similarly explosive. There’s so many weird plot points – such as Bernadette’s cyber secretary turning out to be a Russian hacker or husband Elgin (Billy Crudup, utterly trounced by the material) trying to have her committed to a mental hospital against her will – that just make Bernadette’s whimsical telling seem all the more inexplicable. Its jumbled take on mental health is splashed with an unrelenting dose of lighthearted pluck, the upbeat score from Graham Reynolds and Sam Lipman a nonsensical addition to the confusion that drives at a movie whose internal logic is running counterclockwise from go. Linklater’s movie is the punchline to “An FBI agent, a therapist and flirty secretary walk into an intervention…” joke and is sure to be considered the embarrasing faceplant pocket of his career that he’ll look back upon with great shame.

Lost in the brambles, Where Did You Go Bernadette is a puzzle that Linklater and all his creativity could not crack, the adaptation a blight on an otherwise accomplished and diverse filmography. This is the apotheosis of a film gone wildly off the tracks, Annapurna first delaying and now dumping the thing in the bowels of August programming to unsuspecting audiences about to be duped into a black hole of logic and emotional consistency. Theirs is a movie that thinks everything can be solved with a half-hearted apology but, unfortunately, it will take more than the for Linklater to recover from this epic disaster of a film.

CONCLUSION: The talented Mr. Richard Linklater has gone and shit the bed with the steaming pile of oddball quirk that is ‘Where’d You Go Bernadette’. Even the illustrious Cate Blanchett can’t make sense of this broken story that leads audiences further and further down a rabbit hole of true WTF proportions.