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Back to ‘Boyhood’: Great Film or Brilliant Gimmick?
Revisiting the 2014 Oscar winner (and loser) that took 12 years to make.
In a world where our taste in art often seems to be preordained by what critics and experts think, I don’t always love what they tell me to love. In fact, I rarely do. I still think The Irishman, Marriage Story, and Little Women were the most overrated movies of 2019.
Even more rarely do I love what the critics tell me to hate. Then along came Where’d You Go, Bernadette. I recently watched director Richard Linklater’s 2019 comedy-drama starring Cate Blanchett, and I spent much of its one-hour, 49-minute running time wondering why it flopped so hard with critics and moviegoers (Rotten Tomatoes rating: 48 percent, domestic gross: $9.2 million).
Considering the caliber of its cast (which also includes the generally underused Billy Crudup and Kristen Wiig in key roles), Linklater’s Oscar pedigree (which includes nominations for the Before Sunrise trilogy and Boyhood), and the movie’s brisk pace and crowd-pleaser of an ending, I can think of just one explanation: the source material. Unlike Little Women, which was based on a beloved novel from the century before the last one that many adults read and forgot years ago, if they read it at all, Bernadette had the misfortune of being an…
