"Bernadette" and "Brittany"

Let's spotlight some overlooked summer indies today.

I never know what I'm going to get from Richard Linklater, but the idea of him teaming up with Cate Blanchette sounded interesting. And the title character of"Where'd You Go Bernadette"?" - Bernadette Fox - is a very interesting woman to get to know. She's a celebrated architect who transplanted herself to Seattle after a major trauma, stopped working, and has been an antisocial grump ever since. She suffers an existential crisis when her precocious daughter Bee (Emma Nelson), who is about to head off to prep school, wants her and Bernadette's workaholic husband Elgin (Billy Crudup) to take a family trip to Antarctica first.

But while I enjoyed Blanchette as the troubled, prickly Bernadette, and I think her character is pretty sound in construction, everything around her is pretty half-baked, and sometimes just downright preposterous. There is Bernadette's gossipy next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who Bernadette antagonizes to troubling extremes. There is Bernadette's habit of dictating long E-mails to an unseen virtual personal assistant, Manjula. Bee is one of those terrible cinema children who are not only wiser than their years, but wiser than their parents and everyone else in the movie. Also, Judy Greer pops up as a psychiatrist, and Laurence Fishburne pops up as an old friend of Bernadette's, just to give other characters an excuse to explain backstories and set up other parts of the plot. And then an FBI agent (James Urbaniak) shows up.

There are some fun twists and turns, and a good chunk of the film actually takes place in and around Antarctica. The scenery is gorgeous, but Linklater has difficulty keeping his tone consistent. Whenever the film switches from Bernadette to Bee's perspective, it gets much more saccharine and wide-eyed, and all the adults seem to lose a few IQ points. I suspect if the film had just stuck with one or the other, it would have worked better. As it is, this is a weird little film about a dysfunctional family that doesn't feel remotely plausible, and isn't quite colorful enough to make any sort of allegory work either. And that's a shame because Bernadette is a fascinating character who I was happy to get to know over the course of the film's running time.

From Bernadette we go to Brittany, of "Brittany Runs a Marathon." It's a feel-good comedy with some lightly raunchy humor, charting the efforts of overweight New Yorker Brittany Forgler (Jillian Bell) to better herself. Brittany starts out as an immature partier whose life is a mess. After being ordered by her doctor to lose fifty pounds for her health, Brittany takes up running and eventually befriends fellow runners Catherine (Michaela Watkins) and Seth (Micah Stock). A new job puts the scuzzy but lovable Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar) into her orbit too.

This is easily the best self-improvement movie that I've seen in a long time, even though it's clearly the work of a first time director on a limited budget. The filmmaking isn't much to write home about. The script, however, is fantastic. Brittany is overweight, but that isn't her biggest problem by a longshot, and getting healthy and fit only serves to highlight other areas of her life that need work. I was happily surprised that the film even went as far as to show how Brittany's workout habits could lead to self-harm, and her weight obsession becomes unhealthy. The handling of all the running and training and lifestyle impact pings as unusually genuine too, including moments of backsliding, people's different attitudes toward Brittany's new activities, and the economic realities of actually running a marathon.

Jillian Bell does wonderful work here, bringing us along on each step of Brittany's journey as she both physically and emotionally transforms. From the start, Brittany is charming but behaves terribly. She makes fun of people alongside mean girl gal-pal Gretchen (Alice Lee). She's initially wary and dismissive of Catherine due to her own insecurities. She can't stand real intimacy and counters criticisms with jokes or hostility. Any whiff of pity or condescension sets her off. And it's these obvious personality flaws that make Brittany much more compelling than similar characters like Amy Schumer in "Trainwreck." I like how the movie gradually addresses these issues more and more as the film goes on, as Brittany gets thinner and less able to hide behind her physical flaws. And thanks to Bell, the worse she acts, the more you root for her to improve.

"Brittany Runs a Marathon" is one of the nicer surprises I've had at the movies this year, and a good reminder that smaller films have lots to offer these days.

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