In Maria Semple's best-selling 2012 novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette, the titular heroine Bernadette Fox goes missing — for hundreds of pages. With her teenage daughter Bee (the book's narrator) and her genius tech-bro husband Elgin mystified as to her whereabouts, the story pieces together Bernadette's character through letters, emails, FBI documents, and even emergency-room bills. Bernadette is, in short, absent from large portions of a novel bearing her name.
When it came to adapting Bernadette into a movie, however, writer-director Richard Linklater took a decidedly different approach. In his movie, the misanthropic former architect (played by Cate Blanchett) is almost never not onscreen. In a drastic departure from the novel's central conceit, the viewer faces precisely zero uncertainty about Bernadette's location for all but one brief scene, in which she jumps out of a bathroom window. "We can't have our protagonist be gone from the movie for 35, 40 minutes — she's the story," Linklater says. "Bee doesn't know where Bernadette is. Elgie doesn't know. So it's still the story; you're just given more privilege. To me, her journey is really what it's all about."
