Bernie

I wasn’t expecting much out of Bernie. I’d lost my taste for Jack Black right around the time I got into the upper levels of high school. But I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised, Bernie gave me a revelatory performance by Black, a deliciously twisted and dark comedic film filled with grotesque small-town denizens who wouldn’t seem out of place in a Southern Gothic short story from Faulkner or O’Connor. That it’s based on a true story isn’t surprising, the real world is a far stranger place than any writer’s imagination could ever be.

It tells the story of a happy-go-lucky mortician who befriends a small town’s shrillest and meanest old wealthy widow. As their friendship begins to turn more and more controlling and abusive, he snaps and kills her. The hilarious part of the story is that everyone in the town is glad that he did it, and no one wants to him to be found guilty. And just about every person in the town wants the case to be dropped, and admits that if it does go to trial that none of them will vote against him. That is, until the District Attorney, and a town outsider, comes in and makes sure that Bernie gets sent straight to jail one way or another.

The film is hard to describe as it exists somewhere between totally fictional account and pseudo-documentary. You see, practically all of the townspeople are played by the real life denizens who share their anecdotes about the three main players and the tragicomic incident at the heart of the story. They prove two things: the myth of southerners being born storytellers who can inject warmth, humor and acidic comments wrapped in good-natured cheer are absolutely true, and that small town people, particularly of the Texan/southern variety, are an eccentric bunch.

Beneath the blacker-than-midnight humor there is a complicated love poem to small town eccentricity, seeing as how it never judges any of its characters or their actions and simply lets the real people just sit there and tell their stories. There’s no big city, liberal mindset painting these people as backwater inbred too kooky and dumb for us to take seriously. Their natural warmth, humor and strangeness shine through. It’s a complicated film that seemingly morphs back-and-forth at will. It’s never cleanly wrapped up, or even smoothly transitioned between one and the other, but its ambition is a major part of its charm.

And while I found McConaughey to be the weakest link of the three leads, each of them hits the correct tone and appear to be having a grand time portraying their characters. Black turns his manic, ADHD energy down and guides towards creating a cheerful character. I wasn’t aware he could play anything other than “Jack Black,” but Richard Linklater also guided him to a unique and heartfelt performance in School of Rock, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised by this. But it’s Shirley MacLaine who is clearly relishing the chance to play so spiteful and contradictory a person. She temporarily thaws and turns into a semi-decent human being long enough for Bernie to tell everyone she’s not as bad as seems, before promptly and irrevocably changing back into the screaming, manipulating toddler she always was.

This year saw a lot of great movies come through, and Bernie was a real unexpected delight for me. It’s not perfect, but its far more unique and ambitious that most of the neater, more tidy offerings we get in any given year. That it tries to forge its own genre, or reinvent several offers – I’m not quite sure, is reason enough to seek it out and that is to say nothing of the performances, humor and through-the-looking-glass homespun charm.