Exactly How the 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' Movie Compares to the Book
Cate Blanchett's latest film, Where'd You Go Bernadette, hits theaters on Friday, August 16.
The movie is based on Maria Semple's 2012 book—and here's how they compare.
Where'd You Go Bernadette, a new film starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, and newcomer Emma Nelson, is adapted from Maria Semple's 2012 novel of the same name. Semple's bestseller is the darkly comic tale of a highly creative yet unhappy woman who's suppressed her talent for decades and finally rediscovers it through an unlikely journey. The book is also, as the title suggests, a mystery. As in the movie, the story is mostly woven together by Bernadette's daughter, Bee, who's become the sole source of joy in her mother's life. It soon becomes clear that Bee's also the only person in Bernadette's orbit who truly understands and accepts her prior to her disappearance.
What made Where'd You Go Bernadette such a page-turner is that, not unlike one of Bernadette's infamous projects, the book is a structural wonder. It's an epistolary novel, meaning the plot unfurls through a collection of letters—or in this case, documents that include Bernadette's messages to "Manjula," the person she thinks is her India-based virtual assistant, email exchanges between judgmental moms Audrey and Soo-Lin, and Bernadette's husband Elgie's TED Talk transcript. The reader's presented with a dossier that provides what feels like rich and intimate peeks into each character's world (peeks that are interspersed with Bee's insights, and her speculation about what happened to Bernadette). Semple teases out the answer to the title's central question through nimble storytelling and pacing.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Richard Linklater's adaptation. It should be noted that turning this sprawling novel into a coherent screenplay must've been Herculean; tough choices were inevitable to avoid a relentless series of voice-overs and a five hour runtime. But in a seeming effort to reshape this story into a warmhearted dramedy, the movie version effectively deflates all of the darkness, crackling wit and suspense that made Where'd You Go, Bernadette so interesting in the first place.
The movie doesn't show enough of Elgie's TED Talk.
Bernadette's husband, Elgin Branch, is half-present in his family's life in the book. Drifting apart from his wife, he's mostly preoccupied by his workouts and his Microsoft passion project, a crazy brainwave transmitter called Samantha 2. Readers only get to know the quirky genius Bernadette must have been drawn to through a transcript of Elgie's career-making TED Talk, which showcases his product. In the movie, we see just seconds of it in a clip, underutilizing Crudup's acting skills and robbing us of a very fun book moment.
In the book, Audrey plays a much larger and more colorful role in Bernadette and Bee's story.
As fun as it was to watch Kristen Wiig pretend to get her foot run over onscreen, Audrey's role is bigger and more pivotal in Semple's book. We learn volumes about the crunchy, insular Seattle community Bernadette hates so much through Audrey's emails. Audrey rescues Bernadette from her intervention by climbing up the ladder on the side of the house; in the movie, Bernadette just runs over to knock on her door. Initially spiteful, Audrey's fall from grace is much larger in the book (and her family is forced to live in a motel after the mudslides). At the end of the book, we learn that Audrey sent Bee the lion's share of documents that make up the novel—a satisfying redemption arc for the book's biggest villain. The movie lowered the stakes by leaving all of this out.
Soo-Lin and Elgie have a baby, and an emotional affair.
This is the wildest omission from the film version of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. In the book, we get to know how petty and small-minded Soo-Lin is through her sniping emails with Audrey before she becomes Elgie's assistant and stokes his suspicions that Bernadette has lost her mind. Soo-Lin and Elgie cross professional boundaries, and Soo-Lin is instrumental in making Bernadette's intervention happen. After a one-night-stand that Elgie instantly regrets, Soo-Lin gets pregnant. Though Elgie and Bernadette ultimately reconcile, Soo-Lin does end up having Elgie's baby.
In the movie, it's somewhat clear that Soo-Lin thinks Bernadette is a snob; she develops a crush on Elgie as his assistant and insinuates her way into his life. Ultimately, though, she's just kind of...there, until she isn't.
Bee actually goes to Choate in the book.
Enamored with her parents' tales of boarding school, Bee wants to leave her Seattle school for Choate Rosemary Hall, an exclusive prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut. In the film, Bee tells her dad she doesn't want to go anymore, and that's that.
In the movie, Bee does go to Choate, which is where she receives the documents from Audrey that ultimately comprise most of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. It's a shocking reveal, and Bee winds up getting kicked out of Choate in part because she's using the documents to make an incendiary book about it all. This is the inciting event that leads Bee and Elgie to finally cruise to Antartica, and that trip is much darker and more contentious than we see in the film.
Dr. Kurtz resigns after the failed intervention in the novel.
Bernadette runs away from home when Elgie, Soo-Lin and a psychologist named Dr. Kurtz (played by Judy Greer) attempt to stage an intervention that would place Bernadette in a mental health facility. In another satisfying moment of comeuppance the movie omits, Dr. Kurtz winds up tendering a letter of resignation after the chain of events make it clear that intervention never should have happened the way it did.
The movie tells us *exactly where Bernadette went* in the very first scene.
Again, as the title indicates, Semple poses the question of where Bernadette went (and why). We don't fully learn the mystery's surprising resolution until the book is in its final act.
In the first few minutes of Linklater's movie, though, we see Cate Blanchett as Bernadette kayaking through the glaciers that reenergize her creativity at the story's end. To those who haven't read the source material, this might seem like a dream sequence or flashback—until you learn, mere moments later, that the family is planning a trip to Antartica. And even after Bernadette actually disappears, the film spends very little time on the mystery of where she got off to.
Instead of the intriguing clues Bee parses out on the page, we literally meet the scientist Bernadette is drinking Pink Penguin cocktails with Becky (Troian Bellisario) and see her head to the South Pole. The mystery is solved before it has a chance to rev up—but hey, at least we got to see the cool South Pole research station she builds.
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