Black makes big impact by keeping it small

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Shirley MacLaine as Marjorie. (POSTMEDIA)

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Alliance FIlms A little more starch, perhaps? Jack Black goes above and beyond for his elderly friend in Bernie. (POSTMEDIA)

Jack Black comes to his film roles with an exaggerated sense of size -- it's not for nothing that he's the voice of the overly expressive hero of Kung-Fu Panda -- and irony. He wears a smirk of recognition: this is me, he seems to be saying. I'm in a movie. And I can sing!

One of the marvels of Bernie, a real-life drama in which Black plays a beloved murderer, is how well he is able to shrink that personality. Bernie is an oddity, a piece of Americana that uses both actors and actual people to tell the story of mayhem and forgiveness in an east Texas town, and Black keeps it small, genuine, and sweet. Oh, he still sings, but he does it modestly.

Even the murder is low-key.

It's based on the true story of Bernie Tiede, a mortician who is hired by a funeral chapel in the town of Carthage and becomes the best darn mortician the town has ever seen: punctilious, caring, generous and kind. Bernie is also gay -- Black foregoes caricature but does allow himself the merest hint of a mince -- a fact that is accepted by the townspeople with equanimity.

They just love Bernie to pieces: the way he keeps the local musical theatre community so energized (seeing Black strut the role of Harold Hill in a rehearsal for an amateur production of The Music Man is a lovely miniature of characterization), the way he leads the singing at church (Black is in fine, but not overwhelming, voice on several hymns), and the way he distributes money when he gets the chance.

We know how Carthage feels about Bernie because they tell us: director Richard Linklater (using a script he wrote with Skip Hollandsworth, who told the Bernie story in a Texas magazine) interviews real townsfolk about what happened. Their testimony interrupts the drama of Bernie, but it also deepens it with authenticity, and this unlikely story needs all the authentication it can get.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's more complicated.

In his infinite kindness, Bernie befriends Carthage's least-loved resident, old Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), who's rich, cranky and friendless. They become best buddies, even travelling together. Marjorie is estranged from her real family -- like everyone else, they're put off by a sour hostility that MacLaine gets across mostly by pruning up her face and looking cross -- and Bernie eventually becomes her heir.

This could be portrayed as connivance, but the film is structured as more of a character study and portrait of a community, rather than a thriller. We're never sure how much Bernie has planned for Marjorie -- like the townsfolk, we've been won over by his quiet charm -- and when tragedy befalls her, we can sympathize with the general sense of relief.

Bernie thus raises an interesting moral question: What do you do when a person you love does something bad to a person you hate? The answer turns out to be nothing, mostly. Only one of the local residents, prosecutor Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey, foregoing his usual laid-back swagger for something tougher), is interested in justice.

The fact that this all actually happened helps make Bernie a dark and eerily comic piece of the American mosaic, but it's a very small one. There's no larger point, and when the filmmakers try to turn it into a cultural war -- Buck paints Bernie as an elitist who goes to New York City to see shows like "Lays Mizzer-abless" -- it comes across as bigotry, an easy and obvious shot at rural manners. (Linklater and McConaughey are native Texans, so maybe they can get away with it.)

But Bernie, bless him, sails through the turmoil, a man who does wrong for all the right reasons. Or maybe for all the wrong ones. It doesn't seem to matter, as long as people like you.

-- Postmedia News

Other voices

Excerpts from reviews of Bernie:

Jack Black, in the greatest performance of his career, makes us see what the people of Carthage, Texas, saw in Bernie Tiede...

-- Roger Moore, McClatchy Tribune News Service

It allows director Richard Linklater to explore his own roots while telling a remarkable real-life story, something too crazy for anyone to make up.

-- Mick La Salle, San Francisco Chronicle

A dead-solid-perfect depiction of small-town life.

-- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

Watching Bernie is a little like sitting on a shady front porch and gossiping with the town tattlers.

-- Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

I had to forget what I knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air, it's like nothing he's done before, and it proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

A sordid, bleak tale about two lonely people drawn to each other like colliding planets.

-- Manhola Dargis, New York Times

Pitch-perfect performances by Shirley MacLaine and an unusually restrained Jack Black hold together this offbeat true-crime saga, but Linklater's keen eye for human eccentricity flowers most memorably on the periphery.

-- Justin Chang, Variety

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Movie review

Bernie

Starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine

Globe

PG

99 minutes

Rating: Three and a-half stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 22, 2012 D6