'Bernadette': flat where it should be sharp

Cate Blanchette plays a deeply depressed woman who's losing it in Seattle.

Bernadette lives in a large Seattle house that seems to be falling apart around her, although trace elements of a re-design can be seen. A sparsely furnished modern-looking bedroom, for example. Bernadette's husband works for Microsoft and has become a Ted-talking star in the world of high tech. Her whip-smart daughter is bound for Choate, a prep school that very likely will ensure her a place on the success track. Bernadette spends much of her time talking to Manjula, a Seri-like digital assistant in India.

Of course, she’s miserable.

Such is the life of Bernadette (Cate Blanchett), the title character of Where’d You Go Bernadette, director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of a well-received 2012 novel by Maria Semple.

Smart, judgmental and misanthropic, Bernadette can be a pain in the butt, and her contempt for what she calls “life’s banalities” doesn't seem to have led her toward anything resembling a cultural high ground. After years of ignoring her strange behavior, Bernadette's husband (Billy Crudup) has decided his wife needs help.

I can’t say I believed any of this because Linklater's movie can’t find a way successfully to blend satiric observation and character study while also giving his movie a bit emotional heft. As social satire, the movie takes hit-and-miss swipes at middle-class parents, over-achieving kids, annoyingly progressive schools and Seattle's tech-crazed world.

Even Kristen Wiig, as a neighbor and nemesis of Bernadette, isn't able to break through; she's playing a character who's so steeped in her "liberal" values that she's turned her life into a form of parody.

Bernadette's daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) narrates a story that gradually lets us know why Bernadette has lost her grip. She was once a star architect who won a MacArthur Grant for her genius. She designed houses that others envied, but after one of her vaunted projects met a tragic end, she vanished from the Los Angeles scene. She and her husband moved to Seattle, a city she says she hates.

Bee announces that she wants her parents to take her to Antarctica as a reward for something or other. Bernadette reluctantly agrees, even though the trip means she won't be able to avoid the horror of mingling with other passengers on a cruise ship.

Linklater's best movies are conversational gems that catch moods and moments, movies such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. He's also made observant comedies, as those of us who enjoyed Bernie and School of Rock can attest. Boyhood may have been Linklater's best and most deeply felt movie.

Here, Linklater's working in a commercial vein while trying to retain the sharp idiosyncrasies of Semple's novel. The movie's most outrageous moment arrives in the form of a mudslide that disrupts a fund-raising party at the home of Wiig's character. It lands with a thud.

There's one very nice scene in which Bernadette encounters a former colleague (Laurence Fishburne) from Los Angeles. She regales him with a dizzying monologue about what she's been doing for the last 20 years. It's one of the few times Blanchett's amped-up theatricality proves revealing.

By the end, Bernadette starts delivering on-the-nose dialogue, offering its message in a form that comes close to bromide. Someone as creative as Bernadette must create or she'll go nuts. She'll become a menace to others. She's not cut out for ordinary suburban life.

Well, I thought, who really is? And, as I said, I didn't feel as if Linklater made me believe in Bernadette or her vast array of problems.

Tiny people produce small payoff

After a clever start, the pleasures of Downsizing begin to shrink.

Let's get the movie's premise out of the way. Downsizing, director Alexander Payne's latest semi-satirical effort, imagines a world in which it's possible to shrink people to a height of five inches. Why would anyone submit to such diminishment? Because those who shrink can buy their way into the good life with very little money. Small people help society, too. They can consume all they want without devouring obscene amounts of the world's dwindling resources.

The first hour of director Alexander Payne's Downsizing has been made with cleverness and nicely executed effects, but what starts as an imaginative and amusing look at the ways in which a scientific "advance" can be commercialized eventually degenerates into a morality lesson for the main character who must be schooled in the ways of life and love.

Payne begins in bravura fashion when we meet Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard), the inventor of downsizing. I won't spoil the reveals of these early scenes, but they give Payne an opportunity to play with scale in ways that surprise and amuse. Lassgard's Asbjornsen is a true believer: He thinks downsizing can solve the world's ecological problems.

The story then shifts its focus, introducing us to Matt Damon's Paul, a disaffected occupational therapist whose ambitions have been thwarted. Paul's wife Audrey (Kristin Wiig) wants to move into a better house, but Paul can't afford to pay for Audrey's dreams. As a result, Paul and Audrey are stuck living the drab life in the Omaha house Paul inherited from his late mother.

The idea of "downsizing" begins to take on more appeal for Paul and Audrey when they meet a downsized couple (Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) at a school reunion. Sudeikis' Dave sings the praises of Leisureland. The residents of Leisureland may be small but their happiness is expansive, in part because they've left all their financial worries behind.

Once Paul and Audrey decide to downsize, the movie hints at a conflict that threatens to lift the story out of the thematically limited sphere of middle-class self-satisfaction that Payne so easily skewers.

At a bar after their pre-downsizing party, a drunk sneers at Paul and Audrey. Why should small people receive the same social benefits as large people? After all, small people contribute so much less to the economy. Aren't they ciphers?

Despite the tongue lashing, Paul and Audrey proceed to the downsizing station: Scenes at the reduction center are well executed and funny in a dry way: Payne treats this amazing process in a matter-of-fact fashion.

But Payne, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor, has more in mind than a looming clash between resentful big folks and happy little people. He enlarges the movie by raising the stakes to say something even bigger and, in so doing, allows the movie to deflate.

The movie takes a turn away from itself with the introduction of some new characters: Christoph Waltz) portrays Dusan, an escapee from Eastern Europe, who seems savvy about life in Leisureland. Waltz's Dusan and his pal Joris (Udo Kier) are party animals who devote themselves to sensual pleasure and shady entrepreneurial efforts. Dusan's credo: Tomorrow be damned. Party on.

After one of Dusan's epic parties -- at which Paul samples his first hallucinatory drugs -- Paul meets one of the Vietnamese women (Hong Chau) who arrives with a crew to clean up the previous evening's mess.

Hong's Ngoc Lan Tran was transported from Vietnam to Leisureland against her will, something to do with her role as a staunch dissident. A shabby prosthetic device has replaced the leg Lan Tran lost during her ordeal. For a hot minute, Lan Tran was a political celebrity in Leisureland. Now, she runs a cleaning crew.

It's just here that the movie loses steam. Lan Tran introduces Paul (and us) to the Third World aspects of Leisureland, impoverished people who are even further removed from life's luxuries than Paul. Leisureland, we learn, has slums and some of its residents die for a lack of medical care.

Much is made of Paul's last name. He's Paul Safranek. No one seems to be able to say Safranek without mangling it, a running bit that suggests Paul's inability to establish himself in the world. Paul ultimately affirms his identity through exposure to those less fortunate than himself, folks who seem to be either Latino or Asian.

Speaking in a clipped style, Hong Chau becomes a jarring voice in the midst of Leisureland's soothing prosperity. Hong's expressiveness and determination in the face of her character's limited language skills can't quite overcome the stereotypical nature of the character she's playing.

As the movie progresses, Payne tries to deal with environmental catastrophe and the kind of love that's expressed by caring for others, turning the self-serving delusions of Leisureland on their head.

I guess that Payne wanted to transcend satire and find something human, but in the attempt, the movie loses touch with its resourcefulness. It becomes ... well ... downsized.

A funny, messy 'Anchorman 2'

If promotional effort counts, Will Ferrell deserves 2013's award for being the hardest working man in showbusiness.

In full Ron Burgundy regalia, Ferrell seems to have turned up everywhere. In some markets, willing news anchors have acted as if Ferrell's promotions are the funniest thing ever. To which I only can say, "Puh-leeze."

Not that Ferrell isn't funny: It's just that his Anchorman 2 promotional shtick wore me out.

Now, allow me to equivocate some more. There's little question that Ferrell's Ron Burgundy qualifies as a classic comic character, a self-absorbed anchorman who's as devoted to his hair as he is to the pursuit of truth, justice and the American way.

The original movie, a modest box-office success, has done landmark business in the secondary market. Excitement about the sequel, even though it arrives nine years after release of the original, is running high.

So what's the verdict?

Let me put it this way: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues put me in mind of Charles Dickens's famous opening for A Tale of Two Cities: To paraphrase and perhaps overstate matters: Anchorman 2 is the best of comedies; it's also the worst of comedies. If you read a little further into Dickens' opening paragraph, you'll find this sentence, as well: "It was the age of foolishness."

If Anchorman 2 is representative of its time, we are indeed living in another age of foolishness. Unashamedly ridiculous, this sequel catches up with characters from the first installment some 10 years after we first met them.

Ron and his wife Victoria (Christina Applegate) are now a news team in New York City. When the anchor of the network evening news (Harrison Ford) cedes his job to Victoria, a jealous Ron goes into a tailspin, abandoning his wife and young son (Judah Nelson) and landing work as an announcer at San Diego's SeaWorld.

Ron's rescued from exile when an eager representative (Dylan Baker) of an emerging 24-hour news network invites him to gather his old team and become part of the fledgling GNN family.

This gives director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Ferrell, an opportunity to bring back the cast from the first installment: Paul Rudd returns as Brian Fantana, hard-partying investigative reporter; Steve Carell reprises his role as Brick Tamland, the world's weirdest weatherman; and David Koechner revives Champ Kind, America's crudest sportscaster.

Added to the mix are Kristen Wiig, as a weirdly intense love interest for Carell's Brick; Megan Good, as GNN's hard-charging boss; and James Marsden as Jack Lime, GNN's handsome anchor and network star.

While Lime headlines GNN's newscast, Burgundy and his cohorts are relegated to the 2 a.m. slot, which is about as close to prime time as Burgundy is to Edward R. Murrow.

But wait....

Burgundy regains prime-time exposure when he stumbles upon a rating-boosting formula, a mix of feel-good news and mindless patriotism, all presented with Ferrell's masterful pomposity.

Setting the story during the period when non-stop news was born gives Ferrell and McKay an opportunity to add a bit of trenchancy to their comedy, serving up satire about the 24-hour news cycle and the vacuousness of so much of broadcast news.

It would be nearly impossible to sum up all the gags and sketchy plot lines in Anchorman 2, which survives a woeful beginning before providing its biggest laughs. It also would be unfair to reveal the many big-name cameos that are stuffed into the picture's finale. Discovering their presence is half the fun.

By the time, the end credits roll, you either will have submitted to the movie's unashamed foolishness or you'll have found the nearest exit.

If memory serves (and who knows about that), the approach here seems more scattershot than in the original, which also was directed by McKay. Anchorman 2 emerges as a disjointed collection of gags -- one involving a rescued shark, another mocking the over-produced oomph of summer movies, another reducing Ron to bawling infancy. The list goes on -- and then on some more.

You get the idea, when it's bad, Anchorman 2 falls flat; when it's good, it's a preposterously silly look at ... well ... I'm not entirely sure what.

Still, I laughed enough to leave the theater with a smile on my face or maybe it was a half smile, inspired partly by my puzzlement at the hit-and-miss quality of the whole affair and partly by the bits I found too funny to resist.