Review of Bernie (2012) by Derek T — 23 Feb 2013

Bernie has been billed as a black comedy, but it's more of a docudrama with comedic elements. It's the true story of a small town in East Texas and how they have dealt with the strange case of Bernie Tiede, the still-beloved assistant funeral director who killed an octogenarian widow and kept her death secret for several months.

It's an odd story, and Linklater allows the viewer to marinate in the oddness of the characters and the setting. The real star of the film is the town of Carthage and its people. Linklater smartly juxtaposes real townspeople with the actors in the dramatic scenes, and he also uses cutaway interviews to give the real perspective of the real folk as to who Bernie was and what he meant to them.

It helps to humanize Bernie, and it creates a surreal feeling throughout much of the film; it also helps enhance what I think was Linklater's true purpose, which seems to have been to chronicle the life of a small town and to present a contemporary American moral quandary: how do (or should) we react when our leaders let us down? Despite all of Linklater's efforts, however, the story would not have worked without Black's performance, in which he smartly plays Tiede with an appropriate sympathy and nuance.

He is not a monster, but neither is he a saint, and Tiede is presented as a fully-rounded character. Black's performance likely was helped by his conversations with Tiede, as shown during the credits of the film, but Linklater wisely keeps Black reined in.

McConaughey and MacLaine do well in their roles, as do the number of other character actors enlisted to play more minor characters, as they all keep that restraint. As a result, Bernie is one of the more genuinely interesting films to come out in the past year, and a must-watch for anyone who is interested in the state of small-town America today.