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Bernie

August 2012

  • D.M. Bradley

Ever-‘cool’ and ‘indie’ director Richard Linklater has made all sorts of movies, from Before Sunrise and its sequel Before Sunset (and now its as-yet-unnamed follow-up) to Fast Food Nation, A Scanner Darkly and Me And Orson Welles, and since enjoying making his most popular pic, School Of Rock, with Jack Black in 2003, he’s surely been looking for something to put this most fearless of stars in ever since. And casting Black as the eponymous lead of this uneasily comic true-life piece is a stroke of genius, as few other major Hollywood players would dare take on such a strange, effeminate, creepy and cosmetically-challenged role, and somehow make the character so funny and gosh-darn-likeable that he could perhaps indeed get away with murder.

With sketchy origins in Arkansas, Bernie Tiede arrived in Carthage, Texas, somewhere in the 90s and became assistant funeral director. The gig allowed him to charm sobbing widows and, with his philosophical need for respect for the deceased, charity work in the community and pious labours for the local Methodist Church, he was soon a beloved figure in the small town. When Mr Nugent, the owner of the local bank and the richest guy around, dies, Bernie tried his utmost to make the grieving Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine, 78 this year and still formidable) feel better, and his gifts and visits turned into a serious, and some say dubious, friendship. Bernie might have been gay (certainly Black plays him as, at least, bi-curious) or had a thing for older women, and yet what the townspeople found most mystifying about this odd couple was that Marjorie was so hated, and that, even though she left him her millions, she eventually treated him so appallingly, with their bond becoming increasingly poisonous. And then, when someone finally realised that Marjorie hadn’t been seen for months (it would have been sooner but everyone loathed her – even her own sister), word got around and soon Bernie was in hot water, especially when a show-off district attorney, Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey, another Linklater favourite), became involved, crime-fighting baseball bat in hand.

With a script co-penned by the director with input from Skip Hollandsworth (who recounted the facts of the case in an article in Texas Monthly in 1998), this features interviews, and sometimes actual acting, from the authentic Carthage residents who knew Bernie, and they all add a downhome humour to the proceedings, while McConaughey is unusually droll and MacLaine excels as the biddy from Hell. And yet Jack owns this, and he’s quite brilliant, from the opening how-to guide to preparing a corpse for burial, to the early getting-to-know-you montage, as he and MacLaine (supposedly) travel the world, get massages and hold hands, to a handful of musical interludes that include a Hammond organ take on Amazing Grace and, more impressively, a stunningly camp amateur-theatre song-and-dance rendition of Seventy-Six Trombones

 

Rated M. Now showing on general release.

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