Review of Bernie (2012) by Shane S — 13 Feb 2014

An intriguing case study on grey morality in the modern era, "Bernie" blends subtle dark humor with documentary footage to make an observation about the mind of a killer who didn't have any of the tendencies of a killer. It's a case of "wrong place at the wrong time" - Bernie's motivations were misunderstood as greed and cowardliness - and also Bernie not taking initiative when he originally killed Ms. Nugent in 1996.

This sort of story is why I love grey morality. I love the fact that your antagonists will be charming and/or just generally nice guys. Not shady Bundy/Manson/Ramirez guys, but generally nice guys who want to help out the community and enrich it in more ways than one. Yes, I knew coming in that what Bernie did was wrong and he should be punished for said crime, but I believe that given the circumstances, he should've at least gotten parole every five years or a 30 year sentence at most. That's the insanity of movies about the "minds of killers" - there's no attempt at this being a cash-in, no writing this because "psychopaths sell like hotcakes," but a general genuineness to the whole ordeal. The idea that an antagonist has to be one-dimensional or just be bad because they were in bad situations that called for better judgment is something Hollywood came up with so we can root for the good guys a lot more.

But do we really want to root for the good guys? In Bernie, who do we root for? The good guys are manipulative - Bernie's defense lawyer tries to use the man's good nature as leverage to make the jury think otherwise, but ends up sounding condescending and disingenuous; Danny Buck is shown to be a very generous guy who has a loving family and deeply cares about the law, but is also shown to be a bit of an attention whore who uses his almost fanatical worship of the law to make himself a household name in Texas; Bernie is caring, nurturing, and jovial, but is also insecure, prone to anger, and does things extremely irrationally; Marjorie has a great legacy and does have sufficient reasons to leave her family out of her will (her family's already successful), but does show signs of obsessive compulsiveness and is very emotionally attached to the concept of Bernie - but the bad guys are nice. In the end, who's good? Who's bad? Who's Luke Skywalker and who's Darth Vader? The answer is, according to Richard Linklater, "nobody. everybody is capable of doing horrible things.".

Like the old woman said in the credits, "we're all going insane." This best sums up Bernie - we all go insane, but does that make us into bad people on par with the most famous serial killers of all time? No. We're just complicated. We need to be analyzed - we can't just be cut-and-paste. This is why we need to go into the mind of a killer. Those who think otherwise are morons who are in denial as to how the world works.