Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: A mother in the midst of an extended mid-life crisis tries to keep her family together, which is falling apart along with her.
About: Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a novel by Maria Keogh Semple, who has an interesting backstory. Born into the craziness that was Hollywood, her father was a screenwriter who wrote the pilot for the original Batman TV show. Maria would follow in his footsteps, growing up to be a screenwriter first, writing on the original Beverly Hills 90210, Saturday Night Live, and Arrested Development. “Bernadette” is her second novel and was a breakaway bestseller, due to its weird formatting of following the story in e-mails and texts. The script is being adapted by Fault in Our Stars writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
Writers: Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber (based on the novel by Maria Semple)
Details: 139 pages (2nd draft)
I get it. Not all of you have the time to read scripts. And if you’ve got a choice between reading and writing, you should be writing anyway. BUT, even if you’re not a vociferous reader, there are certain screenwriters who, when a new script of theirs drops, you need to read it. Sorkin is the big one. Tarantino. Christopher McQuarrie.
And believe it or not, Neustadter and Weber are racing up that list. Not only can they turn cancer into hundreds of millions of dollars, but even comedy A-listers like Seth Rogen and James Franco are courting them (for their adaptation of “The Room”). Where’d You Go, Bernadette, though, is their biggest challenge by far. How does one adapt a novel written in e-mails, memos and transcripts?
40-something Bernadette Branch is… different. An isolationist, her only contact with the outside world comes when she picks her daughter, Bee, up from school every day. And even that’s a chore since it requires her to mingle with other mothers, such as her nemesis, Audrey Griffin, and Audrey’s no. 1, the deceptively sneaky Soo-Lin.
The one source of pride in Bernadette’s life, besides her daughter, is her husband, Elgin, a computer genius who’s on the verge of syncing computers up with the human brain. When the three are having dinner at their strangely dilapidated mansion, Bernadette couldn’t be happier.
Unfortunately, a new wrinkle has entered her life. A long-forgotten promise she made to her daughter has resulted in her having to commit to a cruise to Antarctica. Since Bernadette can barely handle going down to the corner store, a trip to Antarctica will probably tear her open from the inside-out.
So Bernadette turns to her secret weapon, a virtual assistant in India she communicates with on e-mail. This assistant does all the anxiety-inducing tasks Bernadette must deal with on a daily basis – such as order food – and now she’s going to need her to plan her entire Antarctica cruise so Bernadette doesn’t experience death-by-icicle.
Through a strange coincidence, Audrey’s right-hand girl, Soo-Lin, who works at Elgin’s company, has just been promoted to his assistant. The two become friendly and Soo-Lin makes Elgin aware that his wife is borderline koo-koo. And if he doesn’t do something to save her soon, Bernadette may not be able to handle the stresses of life much longer.
I’m not sure what to make of this one guys. It’s soooooo weird. I’ve come up with two possibilities. One, this is one of those books someone writes to show how “literary” they are. Write a bunch of weird shit in weird ways and who cares if it makes sense. It’ll impress the critics and that’s all that matters.
The second possibility is that Semple was drunk. I’m talking legitimately wasted. And since she’s talented, she sort of makes it work. But she must have missed the second half of Hemingway’s famous mantra: “Write drunk. Edit sober.” Cause I’m pretty sure she edited this drunk as well.
I’m bringing up Semple and not Neustadter and Weber because this is her beast. Neustadter and Weber are simply trying to reign it in. And how do you reign something in that has no story? Yesterday we were talking about giving your script a clear goal. We definitely don’t have that here. The only plot point we keep revisiting is the Antarctica stuff. And since it doesn’t have any stakes (or even relevance) attached to it, it’s not driving the narrative forward.
I can see why they hired Neustadter and Weber. These are the guys who made the weird time-jumping narrative “500 Days of Summer” work. You figure if anyone can piece e-mails into scenes, it would be these two. But they seem downright confused by this book.
First of all, the one narrative thread that might save this script is the mystery: What happened to Bernadette? Where is she? But we don’t get to Bernadette missing until there’s 30 minutes left in the film. I don’t know many movies where you save your major narrative engine for the final act. Why wouldn’t you put it at the beginning, then back up flashback style, before rejoining the mystery later?
Maybe Neustadter and Weber are trying to be cute? Seeing how far they can bend the rules of storytelling? I don’t know. But this is a script with multiple character voice overs, some of which are audio flash-forwards discussing the past. We’re doing full-on origin story flashbacks here. Bee occasionally narrates. The lone story-carrot dangling in front of us is an Antarctic cruise. I mean this adaptation has all the makings of screenwriting seppuku.
And even if you get through that, you still have to conquer the razor-thin tone. This is a movie that wants you to laugh (a mulberry-driven mudslide that ruins your villain’s party) but also acknowledges super heavy shit, like bi-polar depression and multiple miscarriages. Am I supposed to cry? Laugh?? I have no idea!!
I see this going one of two ways. As a showcase for some amazing female actress, likely a Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts type. If they nail the part, the movie markets itself as an acting tour-de-force. Or it could become the next “Butter.” For those who have forgotten, Butter won the Nicholl Fellowship, finished high on the Black List, and was similar to Bernadette in a lot of ways. A satire on conservative families based around a series of ludicrous ideas (A butter-carving contest). Both properties are so execution dependent that one wrong move dooms them. And Butter clearly landed on the wrong side of the expiration date.
But I will say this: At the very least, Bernadette is original. There’s nothing else like this out there and we need that. We can’t live solely on a diet of super-heroes and biopics. We need some variety and this project has it. Unfortunately, the darn thing varietied itself into variety purgatory. We’ll have to see if this dynamic writing duo can save it in future drafts. But for this draft, there were too many faults in its stars.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t wait to reveal your story’s big selling point until the last act (here, we’re referring to the mystery of where Bernadette disappeared to). Try to get that plot point into the story as soon as possible. You may not be able to do that in a linear way, but you have other options. For example, you could’ve started this movie out telling us Bernadette was missing, and then jumped back in time to give us the events that led up to that problem.
