Bernie Did a Bad, Bad Thing

*SPOILERS*

Bernie is an interesting entry in the bourgeoning "-ocumentary" genres.  Not a mock-umentary (a fake documentary about fictional events and people), as it's based on a true story.  Not a true documentary even though it contains many interviews with real townspeople.  Not an entirely fictional "loosely based on a true story as heard by a guy who knew the guy who met the guy" treatment either, which we'll call a funk-umentary, because it's like the truth, but funky.   Let's call Bernie a plot-cumentary (half dramatic re-enactment, half documentary), which seems good enough for now.

The story centers around one of the strangest cases in Texas history, that of a respected mortician and community volunteer in a small town (Carthage) who kills the elderly millionaire who employs him as a close companion, and then tries to cover it all up.  As it turns out, there's only a limited amount of time and finite amount of spun lies you can employ to hide the fact that someone who was alive is now dead, no matter how reclusive or disliked she was.  Jack Black is not the actor who would have jumped out at me for this role, but he does a nice job with the part.  Shirley MacLaine is great as the crazy, reclusive millionaire.  Matthew McConaughey is also there.  But what I really liked about this movie was not the performances, but the fascinating intersection of a couple of my favorite topics within the story itself:  How growing up gay in a fundamentalist, conservative culture can fuck you up and how shitty you can end up being to people when you take "being nice" too far.

Which is not to say I consider growing up religious and conservative to be an unmitigated negative.  Bernie is a very generous man.  He's kind to children and old people, goes out of his way to comfort the bereaved at the funerals he assists at, and performs a wide variety of community service activities.  And even after he admittedly kills a woman in cold blood, he uses her money not for himself, but to help out a number of people in Carthage (he builds a playhouse for some needy kids, funds a new wing at the church, helps out the local Little League team, and so on).  Aside from a little impetuous killing, he's a model community member, and people love him.  They love him so much in fact, that the swaggering D.A. charged with his case is so badgered by townsfolk upset at him for prosecuting such a good Christian boy for such a little thing like murder, that he's forced to request Bernie be tried in another county altogether so he can have even a remote chance at a fair trial.  So, how did it go so wrong for such a good man?

It becomes clear early on in the movie, that while Bernie is happy and friendly, it is less in the "all is perfect and well" kind of way, and more in the "I'm as happy as I can be, given my constraints" kind of way.  Obviously, the latter kind of happiness is really the only one that exists for most people, but in Bernie's particular case, his constraint is the fact that he's gay in a community that will not allow him to be openly gay, and he's making the best out of a life that won't allow him to pursue true love they way it allows everyone else to.  They don't come out and say it, of course, but Bernie loves doing the make-up on corpses, lingers a little too long talking to handsome men, never dates women his age, and absolutely adores old women.  He seems to have made his peace with it, and while it is revealed that many of the townspeople suspect he's "one of THOSE people", he's likable enough that they never hassle him about it.  But, speaking from experience, living that deep in the closet in the middle of a community that would consider disowning you (or worse) if you dropped the pretense of straightness probably kept him  quite a ways from being perfectly happy.  I honestly thought Jack Black did a great job of portraying this particular tension in the character very well.

However, as I said, he seems determined to be happy with the situation he's in.  And his religion has taught him to try to be kind, so try he does.  And ultimately, it is this urge to be nice at all costs that really gets him into trouble.  It starts with the best of intentions, of course.  Bernie, who is just this kind of guy, always makes a special effort to comfort grieving widows during and after the funeral of their husbands, usually stopping by their house within the week to drop by some flowers or an assortment of soothing cheeses. After initially being rebuffed by the gruff Marjorie Nugent, his persistence pays off, and they strike up a friendship that starts off working well for both of them, and eventually devolves into a co-dependent nightmare that ends up with Bernie murdering Marjorie in a fit of frustration.  All because of Bernie's unhealthy obsession with "being nice."

Being nice is a great thing, up until a point.  And that point is moment a person starts feeling abused, but refuses to say anything because they don't want to upset the other person.  Marjorie turns out to be a very unhappy person.  Her joy at making a new friend in Bernie eventually wears off and she becomes abusive, controlling and co-dependent.  She takes him for herself and begins to slowly cut him off from the rest of his life.  Bernie is not dumb, he can see what's happening to him, but he wants to be nice.  Most people inclined to be nice are inclined to overlook momentary crossness or rude words when someone is having a bad day, and that's okay, that's the grease that makes society work.  But when Bernie mostly allows Marjorie to abuse him unrepentantly on a persistent basis without calling her on it, it is not nice.  He doesn't like it, it makes him not want to see her and when he doesn't call her on it, and instead just grins through it, he is lying, which isn't nice.  And even on the few occasions when he summons the courage to call her on something, she just snarls back an indication that she has no interest in changing.

Which is where being nice ultimately fails him.  At this point, he should just leave the relationship until she can promise not to be such a pill.  But he swallows his self-respect and growing resentments and tries to make it work, because he wants to be nice.  But as much as Bernie wants to be like Jesus, NOBODY is as long-suffering as Jesus (even Jesus as it turned out that day in the temple), and people can only bottle so much frustration before it explodes in unintended and occasionally horrific ways, which, as I think we can all agree, is not nice.  This was a lesson I thought we had all learned from the "serenity now!" episode of Seinfeld, but perhaps TV sitcoms are not a high priority in rural Texas.  So, because Bernie has been taught in traditional conservative manner to be nice to others, but was never taught to be nice to himself and not let people abuse him unnecessarily, Bernie impulsively shoots Marjorie in the back four times once he simply can't contain his frustration anymore.

As a quick aside, his immediate reaction to her death is really interesting.  Bernie is an extrovert, and feels things quickly, ostentatiously and probably deeply (he said, with an introvert's bias).  After realizing the enormity of what he's done, Bernie rushes over and picks Marjorie up, begging Jesus to forgive him, and sobs deeply.  And after 30 seconds, catches the freezer out of the corner of his eye, stops sobbing, and immediately starts planning the cover-up.  Personally, I think this is might also be attributable to his personal investment in niceness.  Nobody wants to be caught for murder of course, but Bernie does not want to be caught in not being nice.  So he stuffs his best friend under some cold peas, and stalls for months in order to avoid his moment of accountability.  He's a nice guy though, he fully plans on giving her a proper funeral somehow once he can figure out how to cover up her murder, and has finished doling out her money to deserving charities.

Eventually, of course, he IS caught and confesses fully.  And is viewed as such a nice guy, that even after fully confessing to the murder, most people can't believe he did it.  How could he?  He's such a nice boy.  And this is where his niceness bites him in the ass one more time.  He's so well-liked, that his trial gets moved to a neighboring county to ensure a fair trial, where he is convicted on first-degree murder charges by a completely unsympathetic jury (for what is likely a 2nd degree murder case), and sentenced to life in prison.  Where he teaches cooking classes for inmates, works in the library, and tried to be as happy as he can, given the situation he's in.

Bernie may not thrill everybody.  I think viewers who don't have much a history with either fundamentalism, conservatism or Texas may not find much of a hook in the story.  And while the acting, story and interviews are well handled, they don't exactly sizzle.  Still, as a whole, I find it to be an educational and insightful true-life morality tale about how repression does no one any good, and how you really can take anything too far, even being nice.  Now, if you'll excuse me, for my own peace of mind, I need to go give a few people a piece of my mind.

The Dark Knight Obtains Neutral Buoyancy

(As always, here there be spoilers)

This summer's blockbuster season has more or less constantly contradicted my expectations.  I honestly was not expecting the Avengers to be as good as it was, and I thought Prometheus and Dark Shadows would be far better than they were.  Which brings me to Christopher Nolan's grand finale to his Batman trilogy, the Dark Knight Rises, which I expected to be really good, based on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, although I admit the trailer gave me pause.  In fact, based on this summer, I'm prepared to call film trailers filthy liars.  They have at every opportunity this summer delivered the exact opposite of what they promised.  This scandal will rock the industry I am sure.

I am a fan of of the goddamn Batman.  I gird my groin proudly with his symbol.  But after finishing this third movie, I'm no longer convinced I'm a fan of Christopher Nolan's or Christian Bale's Batman.  I don't think the interpretation is terrible, mind you.  I'm not calling it bad, but this third movie landed with a bit of a thud for me, which I blame, as usual, on some questionable writing decisions, an increasing tiredness on my part for gritty reboots and possibly unreported head trauma to Christopher Nolan that caused him to forget half of what he taught us about Batman and Gotham City in the first two movies.  Well, I'll even go further and claim I'm not sure he really understands the character, or at least forgot the basic qualities of Bruce Wayne, most likely due to the afore-mentioned head injury.

Batman, Bruce Wayne, is, at his core, a story about a guy who loses his parents in tragedy, and uses the loss of his loved ones to drive his obsessive fight against crime, so that no one else in Gotham City will have to go through what he went through.  It's crazy, but noble.  So, at the beginning of the Dark Knight Rises, it was a bit perplexing to note that Bruce's reaction to the death of Rachel Dawes was to retreat to his mansion for seven years in a dark depression.  Which seems like an odd reaction for a character whose response to loss is typically to fight crime MORE obsessively.  Additionally, from the tone at the end of the Dark Knight, the implication seemed to be that Bruce was going to keep fighting crime, whether the police were on his side or not.  You know, that's what made him a dark knight.  We also learn that during Batman's self-imposed exile, Jim Gordon and the GCPD rid the streets of crime, sans Batman's help which doesn't seem to validate many of his earlier efforts.  So this is why I was kind of nervous from the very start of the movie.  The idea seemed to be that Batman was neither all that driven, nor all that crucial to Gotham's well-being.  Okay then.

The plot, from there, takes a while to build up steam and a lot of it works really well.   The story is a pretty stable mashup of the Dark Knight Returns, No Man's Land and Knightfall story lines from the comics.  The Dark Knight Returns elements, as mentioned, did not feel right to me (in the comics he retires and Gotham suffers for it, not thrives), but the other stories work pretty well together, if not extraordinarily so.  Bane and his "Shakespeare in a can" voice were pretty entertaining, and while the "gotham must be cleansed" plot from the league of shadows was a pure re-hash of the first movie, it was at least consistent.  I enjoyed Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle as well, even if I think her character was underused.  Basically, the first half of the movie, chronicling a dis-spirited and struggling Batman's attempt to figure out what Bane's up to and stop him, only to have his back broken for the trouble, is pretty watchable, if not perfect (the stock exchange heist goes from daylight to dark in about 20 seconds, and a tumble off of a motorcycle at high speed is comically slow).  It's the second half where the plot starts to unwind a bit.

Don't get me wrong, it's still very watchable.  But if you're the kind of person who struggles to enjoy a movie once the plot starts becoming incoherent, you may find find the second half more difficult.  First, the pit.  Oh god, the pit.  Bane, in an attempt to torment Bruce, sends him to the pit where Bane himself was forged in absolute darkness, and in savage brawls with the other inmates.  Which is why it's fairly funny in retrospect to realize that all of Bruce's scenes there are filmed in a beautiful natural light, and he is not only repaired by the staff physician, but receives much support, encouragement and assistance from the other inmates in his attempt to  leave.  He does this by attempting to climb out of the pit up the stone wall, and after he and his freshly healed back survive two 50-ft falls, broken only by the rope around his mid-section (it's a stretch), he manages to learn the vital life lesson he needs to defeat Bane and leave the pit.  As it turns out, there are no guards at the top, and a convenient rope to lower down to everyone else, so really, any passing shepherd could have saved them all at any time.  Everything about the pit is stupid.

Bane's master plan could also have been tighter.  Yes, it's fine that he wants to destroy Gotham for it's sins, I like that in a supervillain.  What I don't get is why he doesn't just set the bomb off, instead of putting gotham through a 5-month morality play about class warfare, and makes locating the bomb a fairly solvable puzzle.  Nor do I understand why he and Talia are prepared to die along with everyone else, when suicide was not the modus operandi of Ras Algul's league of shadows.  Was there no grander plan than blowing up Gotham?  How would that strike fear into the rest of the world if all the perpetrators were dead afterwards?  Furthermore, why keep the cops alive?  He's going to kill them eventually anyway, where does keeping the only army capable of challenging him alive get him?

Which brings me to the second way Nolan contradicts himself between this movie and the Dark Knight.  At the end of the Dark Knight we learn that Gotham has a better soul than the villains give them credit for.  Given the opportunity to blow each other up to save themselves, even the prisoners do the right thing.  Gotham won't tear itself apart at the whim of a madman (absent chemically induced fear mania). But when Bane shows up and terrorizes them, they're suddenly okay with it?  Are Gothamites just suckers for a good Sean-Connery-eating-beans-out-of-a-can impression?

The finale itself, I had mixed feelings about.  The cops charging Bane's army was kind of silly.  It's as if they all forgot they had guns.  The revelation that Talia had been pulling all the strings was fun, if predictable.  Although it effectively muted any satisfaction at Bane's defeat.  Batman's morality gets a little confused as well, in that he refuses to kill Bane, but doesn't disown Selina for doing it for him, and his firing on Talia's truck from the Bat effectively kill her and her driver, which he doesn't seem to show remorse about.  Talia's death rattle, by the way, was borderline comical.  And beyond that, I liked at least that he got to go out the hero, and retire to lead a quiet Bruce Wayne-ish life with Selina.

So yes, it's nice that Batman gets to live out the rest of his days in peace, but I don't really like who Batman turns out to be in Nolan's universe.  I mean, yes, the gadgets, the vehicles and the villains were pretty fun, but Batman himself is kind of weak.  I mean, Bale plays a pretty good, if not super compelling, moody billionaire, but when he's got the mask on and his cheeks are all poofed out and he's spitting angrily at whomever he's holding by the collar, it's kind of comical.  Beyond, that, this grand arc where billionaire loses parents, becomes obsessed with crime fighting for a few years . . . until he quits in self-pity before finally rousing himself for one last battle, where he fakes his death and lives a life of idle luxury happily ever after just seems less epic than it could be.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the first two movies a great deal, but I thought they were building to something, you know?  Building towards some grand final, theme about this madman, the Batman.  And in the end that theme is: Batmanning is hard for billionaire playboys who can't really sustain the effort for more than a few years.  Which is realistic to be sure.  But I think too much realism destroys a comic book story and sad to say, I think this is exactly what happened with the Dark Knight Rises.