Bernie

Bernie Tiede and Marjorie Nugent (left), along with dramatic recreations

Bernie Tiede

BERNIE                      B                     

USA  (104 mi)  2011  d:  Richard Linklater

I’d never seen a movie told from the perspective of a group of gossips, but in this case it seemed like the proper narrative technique that would reveal everything you could ever really know about the town and the people involved.         —Richard Linklater, director

The American South continues to be a subject of fascination, where even at the most recent Cannes Film Festival, three new films prominently featuring the South were represented there, Jeff Nichols’ MUD (2012), shot in Arkansas, also Benh Zeitlin's BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (2012) and Lee Daniels’ THE PAPERBOY (2012), both shot in Louisiana, with two of these films also starring Matthew McConaughey, who has apparently become synonymous with the face of the South.  Even documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog took his camera team to Conroe, Texas in Into the Abyss, a film that explores the ramifications of the death penalty, where the state had no problem executing someone with a lifelong history of untreated mental illness, interviewed a week before his execution where there’s not an ounce of comprehension about what he’d done.  Richard Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, but relocated to Austin, where he often makes use of the state of Texas in his films.  Pulling a story ripped from the headlines, based on a Skip Hollandsworth article the director read in The Texas Monthly, January 1998, Midnight in the Garden of East Texas., BERNIE is a highly satiric, comically lampooning, Christopher Guest style faux documentary about a real event, using fictionalized observers who continually offer wry comments, a Greek chorus, known as the Gossips by Linklater, authentic townspeople that knew the real Bernie who were used as extras, completely indistinguishable from professional actors, who are seen throughout savagely discussing a scandalous event that supposedly shocked the tiny East Texas town of Carthage, Texas, population 6,779.  This is a Christian, Bible-belt community where everyone knows everybody else, where there are few secrets to hide, but one thing they could all agree on was what a hateful woman Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) is, a cantankerous 81-year old widow who generally despises everyone.  The commentary is so odious that all MacLaine has to do is scrunch her face into a perpetual scowl, otherwise known as a prune face, guaranteed to get laughs without even uttering a word.  Still, Nugent is exquisitely played and is perfecftly believable as an eccentric old hag that probably hides all her money behind the wallpaper in the walls of her immense country manor filled with wild game animal heads with antlers mounted on the wall, which reflect the manly presence of her former husband, a filthy rich tightwad of a banker who left her everything.  

The title character, however, is Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the carefully groomed assistant funeral director who leads the choir in church every week, a beloved figure in the community because he’s always nice to frail old ladies, a man who takes seriously the meticulous aspects of preparing the human remains for a funeral, making them look so natural, known for finding just the right poetic expressions in describing how the deceased finally met their demise, always making it sound so comfortable, often singing the favorite hymn of the deceased to commemorate the occasion.  As is his custom, he follows up with visits to the family of the deceased after funerals as a way of checking up on them, but also bringing anything they may need,  His visits to Nugent are met with a quick slam of the door, but his persistence pays off, as eventually she lets him in the door, where they hit it off splendidly, where he even persuades her to rejoin the church, which she had been avoiding for years.  Bernie teaches Sunday school, coaches Little League, dedicates his life to charity work, and even directs and performs in the community musical theater, where he can be seen triumphantly marching while performing the lead role in The Music Man, which, interestingly enough, is about a conman who travels from town to town as an always upbeat marching band instructor selling merchandise he doesn’t have, taking the cash and breaking hearts, before moving on to the next town.  But Bernie doesn’t have a conniving or contentious bone in his body, always lending a helping hand, the kind of guy who just can’t say no to anyone.  Black does an excellent job in the role, wonderfully singing his own hymns, creating a sycophantic, gay-leaning, asexual character that is beloved by all, the exact opposite of MacLaine’s Marjorie Nugent, who remains the embodiment of evil, whose own family attempted to sue her for money, so she hasn’t spoken to any of them in four years.    

Meanwhile, Bernie and Marjorie travel around the world together, strictly as traveling companions, though rumors suggest otherwise, where Bernie’s highest attribute becomes his ability to befriend the one person in town no one else could tolerate, where Linklater fills the screen with plenty of distinctive Texas character, including a sheriff, a hardnosed, crime sniffing district attorney (Matthew McConaughey, yet again), along with an oddball assortment of friends and neighbors that comprise a socio-demographic of the region, including the “cousin-countin’ rednecks” in the next county.  No one seems surprised when Nugent turns up missing except her stockbroker, who is missing his commissions, as no one really talked to her anyway, and Bernie goes to great lengths pretending she’s still alive, continually suggesting she suffered a minor stroke and was not up to seeing people.  But all that changes when they discover her body in a storage freezer, where Bernie readily admits to the crime, claiming Nugent forced him into becoming her personal slave, continually making non-stop demands 24 hours a day, constantly interrupting whatever he was doing with trumped up personal emergencies, until he had no life left at all except to serve her every whim and demand, claiming he just snapped, shooting her four times.  Suddenly with a frozen corpse on display, this twisted tale takes on another dimension, as her hypocritical family arrives on the scene in a tearful state, and everyone wants a piece of her estate, including the government.  Bernie, on the other hand, is facing life imprisonment, a staggering prospect considering he befriended the town’s meanest citizen, whose death is something many in the community would have paid handsomely for.  The film veers into the dark social commentary of Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), interestingly enough also starring a young Shirley MacLaine, where the town not only accepts Bernie’s murderous actions but embrace him for giving so much of the deceased’s money away to charitable causes.  The film is never as interesting without MacLaine as it is with her in it, though she has a near wordless role, but her screen presence is enormous, used to wonderful comic effect.  Something of an affectionate love letter to the East Texas region where Linklater grew up, the director puts the real face of Bernie onscreen near the end, where behind all the levity, his life is a testament to the sadness and real human tragedy that underlies this story.

The Trouble With Harry

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY         B+                 

USA  (99 mi)  1955  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except he was vertical.
—Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine)

A good old-fashioned murder mystery where the whodunit concerns are completely overshadowed by the embellished, personality-driven aspects of this autumnal theater piece set in the glorious fall colors of rural New England, where characterization supersedes all else, as the acerbic tone and blistering speed of the nonstop dialog feels like a tongue-in-cheek Hitchcockian take on an equally comic romp about concealed murders in Frank Capra’s equally enthralling ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944).  Hitchcock obviously loved morbid humor, where the colorful pastoral setting gives this an artificialized, storybook feel, where even the childlike stick drawings in the charming opening credit sequence by Saul Steinberg have a dark and particularly edgy “Once upon a time” appeal.  The opening shots resemble colorful pages of fall colors from a magazine, where every tree is exploding with a painterly appeal, where out of this pictorial bliss appears a dead body.  The film was a favorite of Hitchcock, but one of the few that actually lost money, becoming one of The Five Lost Hitchcocks, kept out of circulation for decades (thirty years for this film) because their rights were bought back by the director and willed to his daughter, eventually re-released in theaters in the mid 1980s.  Only his second comedy after MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), this is a film uncluttered by extraneous plot devices or unnecessary loose ends, but is instead a vivid character-driven account of events that take place one day in the lives of two couples, though they barely know one another at the start of the day, brought together by the presence of a corpse, where each initially has their own unique reaction to his death.  The truth of the matter is no one really cared that much for Harry, nor is anyone truly sorry to see him go.  Nonetheless, the poor guy gets ungraciously buried and dug up 4 or 5 times in a single day, each time with some new revelation about the effect his death will have on the participants. 

Introduced by the whimsical musical score of Bernard Herrmann (later used in a 2010 Volkswagen commercial), in his first of many Hitchcock collaborations, a young boy, Arnie (Jerry Mathers, soon to be Beaver Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver [1957 – 1963]), goes innocently playing in the woods with a toy gun in his hand, much like Little Red Riding Hood, only to be greeted by a corpse lying on the ground.  Simultaneously, Edmund Gwenn is retired sea Captain Albert Wiles, an elderly old coot with exaggerated autobiographical exploits who happens to be shooting for rabbits in the woods.  Seeing the dead man sprawled out on the ground, he naturally assumes he accidentally shot the man and thinks to bury him on the spot, but quickly hides when he hears others approaching, which include the likes of a wandering hobo who steals the shoes, a self-obsessed professor so engrossed with reading his book that he actually trips over the corpse but nonchalantly continues on his way, unconcerned, until the young boy returns with his mother Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine, goofy and brilliant in her first film appearance), who doesn’t seem the least bit sorry about a corpse that she recognizes as her dead husband.  The Captain narrates his thoughts out loud, as what he hoped he could secretly bury and quickly cover up from view was turning into a busy thoroughfare of pedestrians wandering through this precise patch of isolated woods, eventually joined and invited for elderberry tea by his eccentric neighbor, Mildred Natwick as Miss Ivy Gravely, an elderly spinster, and a local landscape painter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), who actually stops to help the Captain bury the corpse.  We quickly learn of budding romantic interests of both the elderly, with Gravely politely and flirtatiously serving tea and blueberry muffins, and the young couple, where Marlowe makes his intentions clear straightaway by forwardly confessing an interest in painting her nude, which leads to the unphased Jennifer changing the subject to her fresh batch of tart lemonade. 

The secret to the success of this witty and deliciously dark comedy is the quick pace of the highly impulsive chatterbox dialog and the warm charm of each of the characters, especially MacLaine, who has the kind of infectious, sensual spunk of a grown up Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), where the setting could just as easily be the cozy small town allure of Angela Lansbury’s Cabot Cove from Murder, She Wrote (1984 – 1996).  Among the more memorable scenes include MacLaine’s curiously detailed explanation of her past with Harry and his brother, also the four of them, like thieves in the night, carrying shovels as they continually walk back and forth into the woods to unearth the poor corpse once again, with a collective intent to keep Harry’s decidedly unpopular influence at a minimum, as who needs to notify the authorities, see their name dragged through the mud, and be forced to re-live this experience all over again?  Better to let bygones be bygones and let Harry sleep undisturbed.  But Harry simply won't stay in one place.  Watching them press and clean his oft buried clothes in order to keep the police from discovering any scent of their unscrupulous activities has an absurdly comical air of wiping their hands clean of any indecent or immoral activity, yet all along they plot like petty criminals how best to cover up their crimes.  This scatterbrained, screwball comedy was written by John Michael Hayes, adapted from a Jack Trevor Story novel.  Shot in Craftsbury, Vermont in late September 1954, nearly all the foliage was gone by the time the film crew arrived, necessitating leaves to actually be glued to the trees in order to create this colorful canvas of idealized perfection, and also, due to the incessant rain, several scenes were shot in a nearby school gymnasium, where a 500 pound camera attached to an elevated crane fell and just missed hitting the venerable director.  21 minutes into the film is Hitchcock’s signature appearance seen through the window of a general store walking past a parked Rolls Royce while an elderly man inspects roadside paintings for sale.  Using occasional racy dialog throughout that might sound more at home in a Marx Brothers movie, it’s curious the effect a corpse can have on an otherwise sleepy and safely protected community, each resorting to innocent white lies that only grow in epic proportion with their wildly active imaginations. 

The Apartment

THE APARTMENT              A                    

USA  (125 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d:  Billy Wilder

Shut up and deal.   —Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine)

Following on the footsteps of his most notable career achievement, SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), Wilder along with his collaborator I.A. L. Diamond wrote what is arguably his greatest film, a strange mix of a satire on the American corporate success story of the 1950’s and a modern day romance at its most wonderful best, moving effortlessly between comedy and drama to romance.  As usual, no one really knows how love strikes, but when it hits, there’s nothing else like it.  Wilder won the best screenplay, best director, and best picture award in 1960, a trifecta of the first order, yet this film doesn’t knock you off your feet with dazzling camera work, but with wit, humor, and some amazing performances by the always nervous Jack Lemmon who is striving for a key to the executive suite and the lovable, yet klutzy elevator operator Shirley MacLaine.  Fred McMurray plays the shrewd boss who wants to have everything, and for the most part does, but ends up instead with only everything money can buy, which isn’t the same thing.  This is an interesting take on marriage, though surprising the unhappy marriage feels like a weight on one’s back, especially when one is wedded to their job.  A far cry from the American Dream, here the job is just another faceless number in the ranks of thousands, in this case an insurance company that actually employs over 30,000 workers where it’s nearly impossible to distinguish yourself, as every desk and every worker looks exactly the same.  While the worker bees flail away on the ground floor with figures and phone calls, tabulating graphs, statistics and flow charts, squeezing every last minute into their working day, the executives on the top floors seem to have plenty of idle time on their hands, sitting alone in spacious offices planning their social lives away from work, inventing excuses like evening board meetings to cover for their extra-marital activities.  At the bottom are the worker drones while at the top are a special breed of male species that can never have enough, an indulgent group that greedily takes what it wants.

A scathing critique of American capitalism, Wilder examines the life of a middle man, a drone like all the rest, but he’s got something else, lending out the keys to his bachelor apartment to various executives for illicit sexual affairs, men who remember these special favors and recommend a fast track to the top for their facilitator, C.C. Baxter, Jack Lemmon in another Everyman role.  While he’s obviously being duped out of his own life, spending his time after work dawdling at his desk or standing around outside his apartment waiting for his “special guests” to leave, Lemmon is a good-natured guy, a bit over anxious but eager to please, especially those in positions of authority, so he grovels and prostrates himself before them while pretending it doesn’t matter, that eventually they’ll send in a good word.  Using a voiceover narration by Lemmon, he recites figures and statistics about the position he’s in, becoming a meaningless number that may as well be corporate property, one in a long line of endless desks that stretch as far as the eye can see, exactly as Welles later conceived the life of K, the nameless bureaucrat in Kafka's THE TRIAL (1962).  Baxter does have something going for him that no one else has, the use of his apartment, even if it is for immoral and salacious purposes.  Wilder pokes fun at this through the use of his neighbors, who think his life is one continual party with one girl after another, with rumba music, bottles of liquor, and festive noise coming through the walls, where he’s bound to eventually drop dead on the spot from exhaustion.  Baxter has so little self esteem of his own that he’s even willing to accept this fake persona as a ladykiller as some kind of personal compliment, an attribute of his real character, borrowing it from time to time as he has no real life of his own.  

Like withholding the entrance of Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), Wilder teases the audience with the late introduction of Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik, the company elevator operator who performs her service with a smile.  Baxter is especially pleasant with her, but so are all the other male figures, many overly exuberant to the point of being distasteful and obnoxious.  The way the male executives derisively talk about women behind their backs reveals the barren emptiness of their own lives, treating each like a commodity they can impress one another with, like a prize winning trophy.  But all they get out of it is a quick fix, something to indulge their quixotic needs that are simply unquenchable, as the narcissistic greed these men are used to has no limits, as they represent the successful business model that feels like the creation of a new phenomenon of being, the titular head that underlings cannot refuse, taking whatever they desire with their rapacious appetites.  The more the underlings try to please them, the more pleased with themselves these business executives become.  In this manner, Baxter eventually draws the attention of the chief executive of the company, Fred MacMurray as Mr. Sheldrake, who vainly wants the use of the apartment all to himself, offering Baxter an executive position if he plays along.  Of course, who is the object of his cheap affections, none other than Ms. Kubelik, the one woman who treats Baxter like a decent human being.  A real conflict ensues, as both Baxter and Kubelik are separately dragged through the mud by the same lecherous man, who is inseparable from the company. 

Wilder quickly turns this satiric comedy on end, where the lives of the characters begin to matter, where the dubious manner in which they continue to be treated becomes an offense, quickly turning to a horrible personal tragedy.  This tumble and fall comes out of nowhere, but has a remarkable effect, as the audience suddenly becomes outraged and sympathizes with the lovable Ms. MacLaine like in no other movie, where she’s smart enough to know what’s happening, but is mostly miserable at herself, never blaming the man or the company behind the abuse.  This is what separates this movie from others, as this is a blisteringly accurate critique of the business world, as the executives are perceived as untouchable, obscenely rich with lavish expense accounts and plenty of high priced lawyers to protect what supposedly belongs to them.  Edie Adams as the executive secretary plays a prominent role as an outspoken whistleblower, surfacing during one of the most outlandish office parties on record, one that rivals the Romans in the picture of decadence, creating a feverish, poisonous effect.  Wilder quickly changes directions on a dime, where the portrait of corporate excess comes to a screeching halt and the impact of human tragedy prevails, focusing instead on an intimate glimpse into the small details of the living, where just getting through each day can sometimes feel like a miracle.  SOME LIKE IT HOT is funnier and more outrageous, but Wilder never wrote anything with greater depth or profound insight, feeling perhaps like this may be his most personal film, the one he’s most proud to have been associated with.  This is the American Dream gone wrong, where the myth becomes a distorted reality, and where a jolt of honesty, a splash of water in the face may finally open the eyes of workers who continue to get exploited in droves.  Despite the passage of half a century, this obscene, lopsided corporate model is the consummate picture of capitalism running amok today.