By Maria Semple
Whether it’s Shirley Jackson or Lisa Lutz, I’m a sucker for oddball, neurotic yt families living in large, crumbling homes. Maria Semple's book was no exception. Now, Bernadette has some serious issues and may be suffering from mental illness (depression, mania, bipolar disorder, agoraphobia, anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia, grandiosity, you name it), but this is treated very lightly in both book and movie. It’s ultimately a light-hearted family drama dealing with first world problems, Hollywood-indie style, which is Linklater’s metier. And he did a great job adapting Semple’s book.
The reader is meant to fall in love with Bernadette Fox. Obviously, she’s terribly flawed, but she’s also a brilliant architect and former recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant”. She’s got great wit and style, and is an awesome mom who’s best friends with her teenage daughter, Bee.
Years ago, Bernadette had a passion project in LA, 20 Mile House, that failed epically and famously due to a vindictive celebrity neighbour. Then after four miscarriages, baby Bee was born with a heart condition and nearly died in hospital. When she didn't, Bernadette was so grateful, she dedicated her life to motherhood. And when her tech-genius husband Elgin got an offer to lead an exciting project at Microsoft in Seattle, Bernadette gave up her promising architectural career to focus on her family, and live out her days as an eccentric recluse.
In Seattle, she found a beautiful turn-of-the-century, stuck-in-zoning-limbo Catholic home for wayward girls known as Straight Gate. Of course, the house sits on top of a hill overlooking a gated community. Converting Straight Gate into a family home was supposed to be Bernadette’s new passion project, but over the years, Bernadette lost her way. Even though she was a good mother and had a stable marriage with 'Elgie', he was too much of a workaholic to notice his wife's gradual disintegration.
Parts of Strait Gate's half-finished interiors are gorgeous and show off Bernadette’s rich, bohemian aesthetics, but the house itself, with its crumbling infrastructure, leaky roof and blackberry roots pushing through the floorwork also represents Bernadette’s creative psyche, which has been neglected and repressed for many years. It should be noted that the film’s production team did amazing work bringing to life the Straight Gate house in its glorious, decrepit state.
We get to know Bernadette through her verbal Siri correspondences with her online assistant, “Mandula”. Even though Bernadette is unemployed, she nevertheless relies on Mandula to help her in mundane tasks, like ordering utility vests for an upcoming family trip to Antarctica. This dependence results in a dramatic plot arc when we learn Mandula's services are a front for a criminal identity theft ring and Bernadette has shared all of her and Elgin’s financial info!
The novel’s epistolary format gives you the inner workings of Bernadette’s mind as she rants about Seattle and its inhabitants, like her gnatty neighbour, Audrey, who's constantly on her case about the blackberry bushes that have overtaken Straight Gate's hillside and encroached into Audrey's cherished garden. Bernadette has plenty of observations about Seattle fathers, who “only come in one style here, and that’s outdoorsy” and her female contemporaries (There are two hairstyles here: short gray hair and long gray hair. You go into a salon asking for hair color, and they flap their elbows and cluck, “Oh, goody, we never get to do color!”)
She certainly showed her privilege when she expressed "consternation as to how the U.S. city with more millionaires per capita than any other would allow itself to be overtaken by bums":
Sometimes these cars have Idaho plates. And I think, What the hell is a car from Idaho doing here? Then I remember, That’s right, we neighbor Idaho. I’ve moved to a state that neighbors Idaho. And any life that might still be left in me kind of goes poof.
Seattle. I’ve never seen a city so overrun with runaways, drug addicts, and bums. Pike Place Market: they’re everywhere. Pioneer Square: teeming with them. The flagship Nordstrom: have to step over them on your way in. The first Starbucks: one of them hogging the milk counter because he’s sprinkling free cinnamon on his head. Oh, and they all have pit bulls, many of them wearing handwritten signs with witticisms such as I BET YOU A DOLLAR YOU’LL READ THIS SIGN. Why does every beggar have a pit bull? Really, you don’t know? It’s because they’re badasses, and don’t you forget it.
We also see Bee's journal entries, which reveal how much she adores her mother, and correspondences from other characters, like Audrey and her friend Soo-Lin, who ends up being Elgin’s assistant at MS. When Bernadette “gave in” to Audrey’s demands and finally cleared the hillside of blackberry bushes, the eroded hillside washed down upon Audrey’s house after a day of torrential rains. Bee observed:
Here’s something about Mom: she’s bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn’t refill her water after she’s asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm. I think she got it form all those years half living at Children’s because of me. I’m just saying, when things are bad, there’s nobody better to have in your corner than Mom. But this calm of hers seemed only to set Audrey Griffin off worse.
One big difference in the book that wasn’t in the movie: Elgin ends up temporarily separated from Bernadette and shacks up with his assistant, Soo-Lin. There were a few other minor differences too, but I can’t recall them because I’m writing this retroactively in February 2022.
In the book, Bernadette was quite funny. Even though I love Cate Blanchett and she imbued Bernadette with intelligence, sophistication, paranoia, cynicism and wit, she didn’t quite capture Bernadette’s sharp, sardonic sense of humour. I think a more comedic actor would’ve captured that, but then again, would she have captured the other facets of her character? I read somewhere that Parker Posey had fought for the role, but Maria Semple wanted an A-list star to be Bernadette Fox. Cate was great, but I think Parker would’ve nailed it.
Most of all, I really identified with many aspects of Bernadette, her aesthetics, non-conformity, even some of her neuroses. This one in particular was me to a tee:
Getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Not getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I’m lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It’s a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee’s lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I’VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE’S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated race car grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.
