To give you a sense of my frustration for this film, I saw this back in August (it is now January), and I only remembered I need to write about it about a month ago. Even so, I was so depressed that I had to come up with something to say about this, beyond the fact that the trailer grew progressively more and more spoilery, that I held off on it even longer in hopes that I would either die or someone would magically notice after doing their year-end review of my 2019 movie reviews and maybe send me a write up to crib after. Neither of those things happened, so now I’m here, trying to get into the headspace for why I went to see this movie in the first place.
Please do not misinterpret what I am about to say as praise for WYGB, because in every way that I can put this it is a snore devoid of magic and a little bit racist for inexplicable reasons, but Cate Blanchett is still glorious. Billy Crudup does some low-key shady shit by allowing a terrible doctor to step out of her wheelhouse in order to have his wife committed by reason of insanity, but all is forgiven because he changes his mind and helps their daughter Bee find her in Antarctica. Have I mentioned the family is fabulously wealthy? Blanchett is an underachieving architect who’s got some Gilmore Girls vibes going on with her daughter and she spends a whole lot of time leaving overtly racist messages for her personal assistant. Their trip to Antarctica is a means of navigating a marriage that’s become pretty uncommunicative. Billy’s confrontation of Blanchett in the space needle on Bee’s birthday is actuallly pretty savage, but I don’t really know why I’m bringing anything up beyond saying that none of this is going to surprise you because you too have seen the trailer.
There is no ending to this movie. What you have already guessed is correct, Bernadette has gone to Antarctica. She has fucked up in a number of ways but her family’s wealth will insulate her from having to make up for her poor decisions, and all of her family is emotionally mature enough after several days of trailing her in ice-breaking ships to be able to do without her for the next fews months and/or years. I’m not entirely sure who the demographic for this film is: former architect moms or architects who want to become mothers or maybe businessmen who are thinking about being shitty to their mentally ill wives? There has to be something I’m missing about this movie.
