Bernie

Bernie is a new film with a pretty good performance by Jack Black, who is probably equally famous now for being a comic musician as well as a comic actor.  Although this film has some ironically comic moments and black humor due to the content of its plot, Black's performance is played as straight drama.

Based on a real life story, Black plays Bernie, a Southern mortician with such a a gentle and generous friendly manner that he is beloved around town.  This is personified by several talking heads of real citizens who are interviewed in the film, speaking about the event the film is recounting--the murder by Bernie of a widow whom he befriended.

Marjorie, the widow, is known as the meanest woman in town.  She is played here by Shirley MacLaine, an actress who has played this type of woman pretty well.  Bernie, as he has done with many other grieving widows, helps soothe Marge after the death of her husband, following up several times afterwards even despite her curt attitude towards him.  She warms to Bernie, and their relationship is increasingly dependent upon each other--she values his opinions in her personal matters, he welcomes the lavishness of gifts she bestows on him.  But--as her gifts get more lavish, so do her demands, so much so that one day, out of the blue it seems, Bernie picks up a gun and shoots her four times, killing her.

This brings the district attorney onto the case (played a little greasily by Matthew McConnaughey).  He seems to be the only one able to see beyond the town's love of Bernie to the undeniable facts of the killing, which is also supported by Bernie's confession.  Everyone else either disbelieves the facts or repudiates the confession and sticks by Bernie.  Or is the district attorney trying to hammer through this case to increase his political power?  It is touch and go as he has to move the trial to another city, not to protect the defendant as is often the case, but to protect the state.


The movie was somewhat of a disappointment for me.  The real life interviews detracted from what I thought should have been (or what I wanted to be) the meat of the story--the relationship between Bernie and Marge.  To me the citizens interviewed all seemed like small town folk dressed in their Sunday best wanting their fifteen minutes of fame.  None of them felt like "real" friends of Bernie's, just gossipy people who saw his genial facade and disbelieved the truth even when it was staring them in the face. Sure they supported him after the fact, pretty blindly, but in the interviews they also speculated both on his apparent homosexuality and suspicion of having a sexual affair with Marge.  Did anyone really know Bernie or make an effort to do anything for him?   I don't think so, at least not what the film shows us, as it was always Bernie doing things for other people.

As such, Shirley MacLaine hardly got any screentime or did much acting beyond some yelling at Bernie for abandoning her or scenes showing them at the opera. She did just enough to give us a sense of the type of woman she was, but not how she came to be this way.  The character of Marge could have been developed just as strongly as that of Bernie's--as many people seemed to have an opinion of her as well.  How these two characters were seen by the town were opposite sides of the same coin.  Perhaps the movie really is not about Bernie and Marge, but about the town.

Jack Black's acting was good although I kept expecting him to be jokey (he was not). The music and songs were also well-chosen, especially the major running theme of The Music Man, a man who flim flams a entire small town, as Bernie apparently did to his town, and some religious songs which were relevant to Bernie's emotion or situation.