Bernie

BERNIE (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), subject of the true-crime comedy BERNIE, is one of the most popular people in the small east Texas town of Carthage.  He’s good at his job and goes beyond the call of duty in following up with new widows to see that they’re getting along OK.  He’s active in church, community theater, and civic organizations.  He’s generous in giving time, money, and knowledge to those requiring help.  

Bernie is so beloved that townsfolk refuse to believe he’s guilty of shooting Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) four times in the back, storing her corpse in a deep freeze, and lying about her whereabouts for months even after he confesses.  If he did do it, she probably had it coming anyway.  Despite the evidence against Bernie, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey) is at a loss how he can get a conviction.

Why would the local populace consider Bernie blameless?  In addition to being the richest woman in town, Marjorie was probably the most disliked.  She had not been on speaking terms for a long time with a sister who lived in Carthage.  She communicated with her son on rare occasions.  People in the area had the impression that she thought she was better than everyone else.
       
Bernie and Marjorie were already the talk of the town before the 81-year-old widow’s death at her 39-year-old companion’s hands.  Although he was no stranger to visiting women who’d lost their husbands, Bernie showed extra attention to Marjorie.  She repaid him with gifts far more lavish than anyone thought her capable of giving.  Gossips speculated on who was seducing who.  Before long Bernie and Marjorie were going on trips to New York City and international destinations.  She gave him access to her finances and made him the sole heir to her vast estate.  For all of this Bernie was subject to Marjorie’s beck and call.

With facts that are stranger than fiction and a story surrounding a murder that is often played as dark comedy, BERNIE exists somewhere between an Errol Morris documentary and FARGO.  In lesser hands the resulting film might be terribly offensive, but director Richard Linklater, who co-wrote the screenplay with Skip Hollandsworth, walks a fine line that observes the absurdity around the crime without making light of its consequences.  Nothing’s funny about an old woman getting killed.  Plenty is about the community that gleefully speculates about what happened but willfully ignores what is known.

Linklater mixes the fictionalized recreation of events with documentary-like interviews of town residents to create a version of the story through their eyes.  Whether it’s their homespun stereotyping of parts of the state or judgments leapt to from rumors about personal actions, their perception of reality is so ingrained that nothing can persuade them that the truth is otherwise.  Since the people are sympathetic toward Bernie, the film tends to be as well.  Still, for all of the information that is on the record, the two individuals in the middle of all the chatter remain mysteries.

Black dials down his usual routine and turns in one of his best performances.  The part is a perfect fit in which he can play off his everyman likability and musical talents to build someone who enchants everyone with whom he comes in contact.  From what we’re permitted to see Bernie is not a complex character and purposefully so since he’s constructed from how everyone regards him.  To his credit, Black’s expert portrayal of this friendly naïf makes it hard to dislike Bernie even after he kills Marjorie.  Maybe Bernie is a virtuoso con man--one of his community theater roles is Harold Hill in THE MUSIC MAN--but the impulse is to want to give him some benefit of the doubt.      

McConaughey is a hoot as the showboating DA who provides the voice of reason amid the media carnival.  Wearing glasses, a cowboy hat, and a tie he sometimes uses to wipe his mouth, he plays up his salt of the earth credibility to cast suspicion on Bernie’s cultured ways.

Typically Linklater’s films find him operating in a philosophical mode that encourages contemplating why and how we know what we know.  With BERNIE he humorously explores what happens when those questions aren’t asked.  In the movies it’s funny when empirical belief becomes so rigid that first impressions can’t be altered.  It isn’t when justice is at stake.

Grade: B+

Year One

YEAR ONE (Harold Ramis, 2009)

Following in the tradition of Mel Brooks' HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART I, the comedy YEAR ONE features Jack Black and Michael Cera as primitive, incompetent hunter-gatherers bumbling their way through the beginnings of recorded history. In keeping with their established cinematic personalities, Black's Zed is a cheerful idiot while Cera's Oh is a neurotic weakling.

These best pals are already outcasts in their village before a literal banishment from the tribe verifies their feelings of inadequacy. After being expelled they stumble out of the forest and into a series of encounters with David Cross as the treacherous Cain, Hank Azaria's circumcision-fixated Abraham, and the libidinous and virgin-sacrificing population of Sodom.

Black and Cera's shticks are starting to feel as old as the ancient times their characters inhabit in YEAR ONE. Black's dialed-to-eleven foolishness and Cera's low energy performance produce diminishing results because this plays like a lazily ad libbed film reliant on their familiar comedic postures.

The screenplay is credited to director Harold Ramis and THE OFFICE writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, but none of the wit found in their best work is displayed here. More often than not they settle for moments like Black eating crap on purpose and Cera oiling up a hirsute Oliver Platt in the fruitless search for laughs.

Other than rooting the humor in scenarios from religious texts rather than riffing on pop culture references, there's little separating YEAR ONE from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer comedic wastelands like MEET THE SPARTANS and DISASTER MOVIE.

Seeds of a better film are planted in potentially more fertile ground when YEAR ONE connects jokes regarding how traditions may originate from accidents and the power-mongering of rulers, basically anything but divine decrees, but it's not clever or funny enough to unleash the sorts of potentially blasphemous challenges put forth in Monty Python's LIFE OF BRIAN. This uninspired Torah-lampooning sketch comedy is as arid and empty as the landscapes which the protagonists wander across.

Grade: D+

Margot at the Wedding

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (Noah Baumbach, 2007)

Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are not the closest sisters, and a reconciliation hardly seems imminent in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. Margot is a fiction writer whose work liberally borrows from her family members' least proud moments. That explains the long chill in their relationship, but Pauline offers an olive branch anyway when Margot comes to visit. It makes little impact as Margot would rather use it to beat her sibling.

Margot and her son Claude (Zane Pais) have traveled to the island where her parents' home, now owned by Pauline, will host her sister's wedding. Pauline will be marrying Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed schlub who occupies his time writing letters to the editor. Needless to say, he is easy pickings for Margot's withering opinions.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's last film, the divorce dark comedy THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, depicted domestic fallout in painstaking detail, but MARGOT AT THE WEDDING takes psychological warfare and familial hostility to a higher level. The film portrays a deeply dysfunctional and unsympathetic lot who spit darts at each other as naturally as breathing. They do so in the name of honesty and openness, which makes them blameless in their eyes.

Baumbach remains skilled as ever with well-turned lines and stinging humor. If anything, the two years between films gave him time to sharpen his knives so the jokes would cut with greater precision. The laughs hurt, but one has to appreciate the artistry in such wicked wit.

Yet only so much nastiness can be endured without greater insight into the human condition, or at least these characters. We would flee from these people in everyday interactions. Being stuck with them for an hour and a half can be downright unbearable.

As a kind of theater of cruelty, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is unarguably successful; however, after choking on laughs for a period, the question becomes whether Baumbach has anything to deliver beyond his misanthropic floggings. Little introduction to Margot and the others is needed to see them for the hateful people they are, but what is the point of subjecting us to this caustic environment if there isn't a larger idea behind observing it?

The ugliness extends to the visual palette. The film has the appearance of being shot through a polarized lens. Cinematographer Harris Savides gives an oppressive darkness to the images, a choice in line with the murky emotions clouding the air. The decision is artistically defensible, but it comes at the expense of leaving the already weary viewer feeling even gloomier. If it's possible to get seasonal affective disorder from a movie, this might be the one.

Ultimately, the matter of degree is what trips up Baumbach in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. The problem is not that the characters are unlikable or totally unfamiliar. Indeed, their harshness and lack of generosity may be all too closely recognized, albeit in smaller doses. No, the trouble is that he has drawn caricatures incapable of self-editing and possessing shreds of decency that we would expect to find in non-sociopaths.

Grade: C+