The Richard Linklater Movie That Serves as a Warning

Jack Black is a funny guy, not only because he says funny things, but also because of how he says them and how he looks while saying them. Black is no king of one-liners or master impersonator or glutton for physical punishment. Instead, his performances in movies such as Nacho Libre, School of Rock, and High Fidelity demonstrate the comfortable charisma of a class clown who survived maturity and grew up to be the life of the party. Picture his wild-eyed expression throwing some mustard onto his already flavorful line deliveries, the ease with which he jerks around his body to elicit a dumb laugh. Even in more consciously adult comedies such as The Holiday, where he dials it back a notch or six, Black is still a natural entertainer. Another way of thinking about this is that although Black is known for his comedies, he’s not exactly a comedian—he’s an actor who innately understands how to earn a laugh.

Yet the movie of his that’s stuck with me the most is one where he’s not funny at all. And Richard Linklater’s Bernie, which came out in 2011, is definitely a funny movie. The story of a mortician named Bernie Tiede (played by Black) in small-town Texas who’s accused of killing an elderly widow named Marjorie Nugent, Bernie draws on plenty of humor through its well-observed ensemble of local citizens, who offer warm, plainspoken commentary about the title character and his ordeals. It’s also anchored by a wonderful comedic performance from Shirley MacLaine, who plays Marjorie—a mean woman whose hatred of the common man is so pronounced that you can only smile. Within this folksy milieu, Black plays it totally straight, never indulging in a wry crack or an exaggerated eye roll. Bernie is nice. He’s humble. He seemingly lives to serve, not to justify his own ego. His gentle, trusting disposition allows Linklater to deliver potent commentary about the power of community—and with it, a cautionary tale about the dangers of grievance-driven paranoia, and of despising people who are not like you.

Even within Linklater’s oeuvre of odd little films about weird American lives, Bernie is an especially odd little film. Many of the director’s best-known works are fictional. But like his latest movie, Hit Man, it’s based on a true story—and Linklater’s screenplay is structured more like a documentary than a work of fiction, with the residents of Carthage, Texas, narrating the movie’s plot after all of the action has taken place. The toggling timelines, as we flash back to how Bernie became entangled with Marjorie, create a noticeable lack of suspense. Bernie was “a loving person,” the first talking head notes within the movie’s first minutes; Marjorie was “just a mean old hateful bitch,” notes another. The use of the past tense immediately signals that something has already happened to both characters, but watching with this in mind isn’t boring or anticlimactic. More important than what happened is how it was interpreted, and processed, by the people around Bernie and Marjorie.

Bernie is the proverbial stranger who comes to town and instantly shakes up the locals with his behavior. But unlike the sheriff or outlaw, his weapon of choice is kindness, which he deploys in his profession as a mortician. Bernie is so attentive to the deceased—the movie begins with him meticulously explaining how to prepare a dead body for a funeral—and so dedicated to the still-living that everyone in town is taken by his presence. For the locals, Linklater casts an array of professional and nonprofessional actors whose regional accents and colloquial aphorisms ring with authenticity. Their positive appraisals of Bernie are justified by Black’s delicate performance. He never raises his voice or shakes his body or widens his eyes in dramatic exaggeration. Bernie exudes calm and decency, and he is swiftly integrated into the community, which constantly seeks his attention. Several of the locals even suspect that Bernie is a closeted gay man—and they accept him anyway, no tiny gesture in small-town Texas.

Linklater was born in Houston, and his loosey-goosey, countercultural vibe of his filmography stands in marked contrast to the ultraconservatism typically associated with his state. Many of his movies, such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Boyhood, show the free-spirited side of Texan youth culture—the artists, potheads, hippies, and all-around freaks who manage to stake out a hearty living even when surrounded by repressive attitudes. By contrast, the interviewed citizens of Carthage are all white, older, and deeply religious; it’s not a stretch to say they’re more traditional than Linklater’s usual Texan subjects. (Although the county that Carthage is part of went for Bill Clinton in 1996, when the movie begins, it flipped to George W. Bush in the 2000 election—and has remained red ever since.) Yet Linklater’s point isn’t anything as banal as Hey, older, white Texans can be inclusive, too. The Carthage residents’ acceptance of Bernie is what makes for an ingenious twist when, after he shoots Marjorie in a moment of passion, they argue that he should be let off the hook.

Marjorie is gunned down intentionally; there’s no doubt about that. Following an initial friendship, after which Bernie is hired as her assistant, she grows angry and resentful of his company—a change that MacLaine subtly portrays as a sign of dementia. Black plays Bernie as way too servile to ever push back; he only gives, and Marjorie only takes. When he kills her, he puts her body in a freezer for several months to cover up her death—and, in that time, spends some of her wealth on purchases for the community. Is decent, sweet Bernie putting this money to good use, given that Marjorie kept it all for herself? Or is he trying to pay for the goodwill of his potential jurors? Linklater’s take is never transparent—but it’s clear that because Bernie is beloved by his neighbors, and Marjorie was despised, they’re willing to excuse his awful crime. The eagerness to see Bernie go free is played for laughs, but the implications are a bit chilling. Should something as allegedly nonpartisan as the law—and a crime as serious as murder—be overlooked depending on what in-group the accused belongs to?

The local district attorney, Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey), can’t quite believe that nobody seems to blame Bernie for Marjorie’s death. In a clever scheme, he’s able to move the trial to San Augustine, a town 50 miles away from Carthage, in order to draw from an unbiased jury pool. That small distance makes all the difference: Davidson is able to portray Bernie as a preening urbanite—a man of expensive and refined cultural tastes who deserves jail not because he killed Marjorie but because he’s them, not us. In contrast to the smiling, inviting faces of Carthage that have dotted the film so far, the San Augustine jury is dour and suspicious. They do not care about Bernie’s interpersonal ties, or what may be his core goodness; what could that possibly matter, given that they haven’t experienced it themselves? “Bernie wasn’t of their world,” a Carthage resident notes, after mocking the San Augustine jurors for being “rednecks.” When Bernie is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, it feels not as though justice has been served, but as though fault lines have been exploited.

It doesn’t matter that, like some members of the jury, Bernie is a white man, or that he’s also from Texas; 50 miles is all it takes for the familiar to become feared. And as the temperature of our national political rhetoric has been cranked up since 2011, with violence and vitriol demonstrated by elected and electorate alike, I sense something like a warning in Bernie about how little it takes for principles to be abandoned—for scapegoats to be sacrificed, and for stern punishment to be handed out by the side all too happy to flex its power. The movie doesn’t work with anyone but Black in the title role, I think. He’s playing against type, but there’s a shallow crossing between “life of the party” and “pillar of the community.” To see someone so congenial and supportive cast aside feels wrong, yet there’s still that shard of doubt about Bernie’s true motivations. Maybe he wasn’t just an upstanding citizen pushed to the edge; maybe he schemed after Marjorie’s money all along.

Partly because of the renewed interest generated from this movie, the real-life Bernie was temporarily released on bail in 2014, but resentenced to 99 years to life in 2016. The actual citizens of Carthage, as well as Marjorie’s relatives, remain split on his motivations, the righteousness of his sentencing, and the realism of Linklater’s movie. There is a fundamental unknowability to some of this—and a leap of faith that viewers must take when deciding for themselves.

But two consistent qualities of Linklater’s filmmaking are his lack of judgment about other perspectives and his openness to the nuances of individual people. There’s a scene in his wonderful 2016 comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!, where, in contrast to stereotypes, a group of baseball jocks hang out with a group of punk rockers at a show. A few years ago, I mentioned this scene when I was interviewing the photographer Pat Blashill, who has spent a lot of time around Texas punks and has known Linklater for decades. Blashill told me that this scenario seemed improbable based on his own experience living among the punks and the jocks—but that the vision fits with Linklater’s style. “He likes that aspect of looking at people who are in conflict, and then it sort of takes a real left turn and everything’s okay,” Blashill said. It’s certainly a lovely idea—and one that is less challenging to render in fiction than when you’re drawing from real life.