Jack Black is back.
The actor who broke out with a non-leading role in 2000’s “High Fidelity,” and then went on to shine in a string of comedies, seems better known these days as the voice of the animated “Kung Fu Panda.”
So who would have guessed the slightly corpulent comedian would mark his return as a real talent playing an effeminate mortician with a melodious church tenor who ends up becoming an unlikely murderer?
| On screen |
| ‘Bernie’ |
| 3.5 out of 4 stars |
| Stars: Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew McConaughey |
| Director: Richard Linklater |
| Rated: PG-13 for some violent images and brief strong language |
| Running time: 104 minutes |
What’s even stranger is that the character he plays, Bernie Tiede, is real. And that the story of Tiede’s grim crime has been turned into a pitch-black comedy — despite remaining mostly accurate to the deadly details.
Black isn’t the only one who surprises us in “Bernie.” Director Richard Linklater, who made the earnest “Fast Food Nation” and the fairly earnest “A Scanner Darkly,” has delivered a purely entertaining film.
It’s not that Linklater is a zealous defendant of the man. It’s that most of the people in the small town in which he and his victim resided are — and were. Linklater co-scripted “Bernie” with Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote the 1998 Texas Monthly magazine piece on which the movie is based. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the article. And those real comments are made more genuine because many of them are spoken by non-actors, extras from the East Texas area in which the events took place.
Bernie comes to Carthage, Texas, to become assistant funeral director of the local mortuary. The small town’s residents immediately identify the man as “a little light in the loafers.” But they don’t hold it against him. He’s simply too nice not to be loved.
He regularly buys little presents for his numerous friends. He lovingly sees off the departed into the next world; his boss tells us he had a talent for making the ugly in life beautiful in death. And he takes especial care of those left behind — especially the many wealthy widows of the once oil-rich Carthage.
The richest is the 80-year-old Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). She’s also the meanest. So no one notices when she hasn’t been seen in nearly a year. And when her body is finally discovered, and Bernie admits to killing her because he simply couldn’t take the insufferable widow anymore, no one turns against the beloved Bernie.
Quite the contrary. Some don’t believe the killer was capable of committing the crime. The town’s district attorney, played easily by Texan Matthew McConaughey, is constantly hounded at the local diner by townspeople urging him to go easy on Bernie. After all, they point out, most of the money he stole from the dead woman he spent on others.
Truth is stranger than fiction, it’s often said. In “Bernie,” they combine to make a bizarrely gratifying film unlike anything else you will see in theaters this year.
