***1/2 Bernie. Written by Richard Linklater &
Skip Hollandsworth. Directed by Richard Linklater.
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| Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) wants to seduce you. |
Since the timely demise
of HBO’s Six Feet Under there’s been
an alarming lack of stories about funeral directors. Richard Linklater’s Bernie doesn’t really count as “major”
in any respect, but it fits the bill for off-beat entertainment from the
nation’s broad, surprisingly creepy heartland. Like an embalmed corpse in sweet
repose, it would be easy to overlook. Don’t.
Linklater has made his name with accomplished, almost
anthropologically-detailed films about the pains of growing up (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before
Sunrise). He did release a straight documentary recently (Fast Food Nation), as well as a Hollywood
crowd-pleaser (The School of Rock). But
it’s fair to say that Bernie is like
nothing Linklater’s done before: a narrative-documentary hybrid about people about
as far from his usual slackers and dirtbags as he could get.
The eponymous anti-hero is Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the
assistant director at a funeral home in Carthage, Texas. In the mid-90’s, the
real-life Bernie had become a local legend in his job—an accomplished
mortician, a canny casket salesman, a caring and sincere consoler of the bereaved.
Always in good voice, he sang sweetly during memorial services. He led the
church choir, and directed the productions of the local musical theater troupe.
His selfless generosity made him so popular among the good folks of Carthage that
they overlooked a fey, swishy demeanor that did not exactly fit the ideal of manhood
in east Texas. He was especially beloved of the blue-bottle widows who
represented the overwhelming majority of his clients.
Things began to go seriously wrong for Bernie when he
took up with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), the town’s richest widow. Universally
despised, Marjorie was the kind of person who couldn’t bear to suffer her
misery alone when she could just as well spread it around. Bernie was stubborn
in his positivity, wearing down Marjorie’s usual suspicion with acts of
compassion above and beyond the call of duty. Alas, he didn’t bargain on
Marjorie’s equally toxic, equally stubborn nature. With a combination of lavish
gifts and feigned helplessness, she made Bernie her manager, her manservant
and, by the end, her bitch. So when Marjorie’s body was discovered stashed in a
garage freezer, the question is not whether Bernie murdered her, but whether it
was the result of a calculated plan—or an act of desperation.
Linklater based his script on a 1998 Texas Monthly newspaper article written by co-screenwriter Skip
Hollandsworth. Instead of telling Bernie’s story in a conventional narrative,
he incorporates interviews with the real citizens of Carthage. Together, these
folks steal the show (if it’s possible for a dozen people to steal a show
collectively) in a way even more impressive than the “witnesses” Warren Beatty
presented in his otherwise dramatized Reds
(1981). When a self-promoting district attorney named Danny Buck (played here
by an actual actor, Matthew McConaughey) brings Bernie to trial for
first-degree murder, Linklater gets to try the case again in front of the same
local audience, arousing the same passions on either side. True, there are some
things left out of the true story—for whatever reason, Linklater opts to play
down Bernie’s apparently homosexuality. But the result is still enthralling, in
that special way a car-crash on your own street can be.
MacLaine and McConaughey are both good in
less-than-sympathetic roles. Jack Black is a revelation as Bernie—sincere and
artificial, ridiculous yet slyly seductive. He’s a phony, but no more so than
anyone must be in a small town, where living together calls for more guile than in the big, anonymous
city, not less. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll have been remembered
for an Oscar nomination this year. But that’s the question Bernie poses, isn’t
it—whether there’s any justice in the world?
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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