angel of death
by Douglas Messerli
Skip
Hollandsworth and Richard Linklater (screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Bernie / 2011, general US distribution
2012
Richard
Linklater's Bernie was based, in
part, on a Texas Monthly magazine
article by Skip Hollandsworth about the small, East Texas town of Carthage,
whose residents expressed enormous support for a self-confessed, gay murderer,
Bernie Tiede, who shot his then-companion, 81 year-old Marjorie Nugent, in the
back four times. So popular was Tiede and so unloved was the mean, money-hoarding
Nugent, that the deed went unreported, her absence mostly unnoticed for nine
months before the body was discovered—by equally greedy relatives and Nugent’s
financial advisor—hidden beneath frozen meats and vegetables in her garage
freezer. After a trial—whose venue was changed to a small community 47 miles
away from Carthage because the prosecutor felt he could not get a fair trial,
most the city’s citizens proclaiming that they were determined to acquit—Tiede
was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
If this sounds to you to be unlikely
material for a cross-genre comedy-musical-love story-court room drama, you’d
find a champion in the real-life District Attorney, Danny Buck (played in the
film by Matthew McConaughey), who argued “This movie is not historically
accurate. The movie does not tell her side of the story.” And some Carthage
residents would agree, including Toni Clements who spoke out: “If it was
fiction it might be funny, but this was a real person in a real town and no, I
don’t think it’s funny at all.”
Bernie, a mortician by trade, may be a
kind of harbinger of death, even, as Danny Buck describes him, “an angel of
death,” but he is also, from the moment he sets foot on East Texas soil, a
sympathetic citizen, who goes out of his way for his fellow Carthage citizens,
a man who not only knows everyone by name and asks about their friends, family
and illnesses, but is there in their times of joy and sorrow alike. Akin to The Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill,
Bernie may have been a kind con-man, but once he insinuated himself into small
town life, he created things for people to do, ways in which community folk
could show their caring for one another. Directing the local Methodist Church choir,
Bernie (Jack Black) lifted his own voice in song. As a director of and actor in
local community theater productions (including Meredith Willson’s The Music Man), he not only helped others
dance and sing out for joy, but performed with equal exultation in various
roles. He advised little league baseball players and proffered financial tips
to factory workers and farmers. Not only could he transform cold corpses into
presentable funeral apparitions, he could eulogize the dead and sing lovely
songs over their frozen forms. Most particularly, he was there to hold the arms
and offer bereavements to the small town’s numerous widows. At one point, the
film hints at the real Bernie Tiede’s ability to offer sexual satisfaction to
some of the town’s heterosexual males (when the police later searched the real
Tiede’s home, they found videotapes of him engaged in homosexual acts with
married men). But so beloved was Bernie in this East Texas outpost, that many
of its citizens could have cared less about the fact that he was, as one
resident put it, “a little loose in the loafers.” “He only shot her four
times,” one resident equivocates. He was one of them.
Through a brilliant mix of real actors’
and actual town citizens’ testimonies to Bernie, Linklater uses the first part
of his film to help us to comprehend why almost everyone so loves this man,
and, more importantly, how dependent small town citizens are on people who
respect and support their communal values. How easy it might have been (just ask
the Coen brothers) to turn this series of short interviews—particularly given
the accented vernacular of the East Texas twang—into a satiric put-down of
rural Americana. Instead, Linklater, obviously in love with the very
eccentricities his unsophisticated characters so readily display, helps us to comprehend
them as true beings desperately in need of love and social communion as the
most isolated urban dweller. Bernie offers nearly everything, except a beautiful
face and shapely body, that anyone might desire. He is, as several of the town
residents repeat, a total “people person,” a man of, for, and created by the
people. "If
the people of Carthage were to make a list of people most likely to get to
heaven, Bernie'd be at the top," summarizes one local.
If we realize in his readiness to please that he is himself a lonely person, so too does Bernie comprehend this in nearly everyone he meets, even in the mean-spirited Marjorie Nugent (wonderfully performed by veteran Shirley MacLaine), whose wealthy husband has just died. True to form, Marjorie at first rejects Bernie’s attempts to console her. When he comes to her door bearing flowers, she scoops them up and slams the door in his face. But nothing seems to deter this gentle man, who appears again with a gift basket of toiletries. Even the devil himself would have to invite Bernie in. Before you can shake a stick, Bernie has put a smile (slight as that may be) on Marjorie’s sour puss, and before long he is ushering her to church and concerts. Within a few weeks the couple are traveling—first class, of course—on jaunts to Russia, France, New York and elsewhere, taking in the delights of saunas, operas, and theater fare. With her help, Bernie buys nine cars, an airplane, jet skis. If the residents are busy gossiping, it is more out of incredulity than suspicion. That Bernie has transformed their very meanest citizen into a semi-human specimen is only evidence once more of his powers as a genuinely nice human being.
But the devil, unfortunately, as a
Carthage resident might have expressed it, cannot change her spots. Before
long, the ready-to-please Bernie has been con-verted by the stiff-necked,
constantly chewing harridan into a lackey to cut her
nails, iron her clothes, even clean and fold up her flowery new panties. The
desperate-to-please Bernie goes along with everything until she begins to cut off
his connection with all the others to whom he has already demonstrated so much
love! She will clearly have him only for herself. So this non-violent lover of
all mankind one day discovers himself, in a kind Jekyll and Hyde
transformation, as a man possessed with the necessity of taking up a small gun
she has purchased to kill an armadillo aiming it and shooting into her
permanently armored hide.
In the final vicious court-room scenes,
played out before jurors whom one Carthage resident quips “have more tattoos
than teeth,” the salacious cowboy booted and Stetson-hatted County District
Attorney twists Bernie’s good-willed intoxication with everyday life into that
of a suave city-slicker’s pre-mediated acts, based on the fact that Bernie can
even pronounce the name of the musical he has seen in New York, Les Misérables, and that he vaguely knows that white wine goes with fish. It is
enough to make a grown man cry!
The glue to Linklater’s quite amazing
moral screed is Jack Black’s near flawless and notably subtle recreation of
Bernie Tiede. Instead of his usual naughty-boy antics, his anarchic defiance of
society, this time round Black immerses himself thoroughly into a character
who, while appearing as a model citizen, reveals the dark hollows of the
American heart. As the credits began to scroll across the screen (which,
incidentally, should not be missed) the three women behind me verbally
concurred that Jack Black should be nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
And, although I doubt the Academy might ever be so clairvoyant in their
sensibilities, I must admit that the thought had just a few moments earlier
crossed my mind.
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