Remember WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S, the comedy about keeping up appearances that a stiff is still very much alive?
Well Richard Linklater’s latest flick has a certain similarity.
What is it with the name Bernie that brings out the blarney in body obfuscation?!
BERNIE has been brewing a decade in the distillery of Richard Linklater’s prodigious picture making mind. Since first reading Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly story about Bernie Tiede, Marjorie Nugent and the town of Carthage, Linklater has had BERNIE on the boil while he completed some eight feature films including WAKING LIFE, A SCANNER DARKLY and ME & ORSON WELLES.
Too much boiling might have burnt BERNIE but the film has just the right consistency to tell this fascinating tale.
“What you’re fixing to see is a true story” declares the opening title of the movie about a friendly funeral director domiciled in Carthage, East Texas, behind the pine curtain.
Bernie’s magic is to take the maudlin and morbid out of mortician’s work, to put the fun into funeral, to “cosmetise before casketised” and make ready for requiem, requiescat in pace.
He has an after sales and service policy which endears him to a legion of doting old widows, but the doting turns to deadly dependency with one particular widow, the detested Marjorie Nugent.
Neither murder mystery nor black comedy, BERNIE has a distinct pseudo-documentary style about it, the majority of the story told through townspeople accounts of what happened when their mild mannered mortician is accused of murder.
This group of gossips with their deep southern drawl is a splendid device to spin this surprising yarn that culminated in a court case that had to be moved to another town for fear that the accused would be set free because of community conviction that guilty or not, Bernie had done nothing wrong.
Linklater’s casting of Jack Black as Bernie reunites director and star of SCHOOL OF ROCK and Matthew McConaughey’s turn as the local district attorney marks his third collaboration with the helmer.
Shirley MacLaine gives grumpy gravitas as the cloying, suffocating Widow Nugent, a pitiable, pathetic person whose selfishness was ultimately her downfall.
Dollops of delicious Southern sayings by a chorus kin to Greek tragedy give this film a charming charge of verisimilitude. Audiences that stay for the end credits will be rewarded with more home-spun comment and a folk ballad inspired by the events.
BERNIE OPENS AT CINEMAS ON THURSDAY 16TH AUGUST.
© Richard Cotter
7th August, 2012
Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews-BERNIE, Richard Linklater, Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine, Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter