An illuminating exchange occurs between a teenage girl and her father in the second half of Richard Linklater’s 2019 film, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Faced with the devastating reality that her mother, Bernadette (Cate Blanchett), has willfully absconded from the family before Christmas, Bee (Emma Nelson) pleads with her father, Elgie (Billy Crudup) to embark on a search and rescue mission to reunite the trio. In response to Elgie’s claim that Bee’s proposal would prove futile as “there’s just no way one person can ever know everything about another person,” Bee insists: ”… it doesn’t mean you can’t try! It doesn’t mean I can’t try.” Bee’s heartfelt declaration crystallizes a thematic preoccupation traceable across much of Linklater’s oeuvre. From the ongoing negotiations of romantic intimacy in the Before trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013) to mediations between divergent masculinities in Last Flag Flying (2017), Linklater’s films tend not to celebrate interpersonal comprehension so much as the efforts characters expend toward empathy: their attempts at “feeling-with” another, in Alex Neill’s formulation. In this chapter, I analyze two of Linklater’s films whose narratives explicitly foreground these acts of empathetic understanding: Bernie (2011)—which centers on the 1996 murder of the octogenarian millionaire, Marjorie Nugent (played by Shirley MacLaine) by her much younger companion, Bernie Tiede (played by Jack Black)—and Where’d You Go, Bernadette—which follows an eccentric but devoted mother and architect who willfully disappears in the lead-up to a family trip to Antarctica.

There are numerous other-oriented emotions at play across Linklater’s oeuvre that enact interpersonal reconciliations (particularly sympathy), however I emphasize the role of empathy precisely because—as Bee notes— the achievement of interpersonal understanding is often acknowledged as fraught or impossible and yet it is nonetheless pursued in these films as a key component of story. While the majority of literature on cinema and empathy attends to the relationship between film viewers and fictional characters (particularly within the cognitive tradition) my focus in this chapter is precisely on the expenditure of empathetic effort between characters within Linklater’s films.