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.
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.
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