Small-town gossip complicates the case in Richard Linklater’s Bernie

At the end of an experimental decade, director Richard Linklater returned to a story that had been rattling around his brain since the ‘90s. Written by Skip Hollandsworth for Texas Monthly, the 1998 article “Midnight In The Garden Of East Texas” follows a mortician, known throughout the town of Carthage as the kindest and gentlest man around, and the widely disliked 85-year-old millionaire widow he gunned down and stuffed in a freezer. Linklater had only made one crime film before taking on this story, The Newton Boys, but the testimony from the Greek chorus of town gossips in Hollandsworth’s article crackled on the page like it was being told in line at Whataburger.

Linklater’s movie, Bernie, would finally come out in 2011, and it is one of the few crime movies in the director’s vast, eclectic filmography. Linklater would return to the genre more than a decade later with Hit Man, another comedy based on another Texas Monthly article by, you guessed it, Skip Hollandsworth. The movies share many qualities, both in tone and subject matter. Both deal with compartmentalization, slippery identities, and how well people really know each other. But what Hit Man doesn’t have is the gossip, and it’s Bernie’s expansive worldview that makes it such a complicated case.

Bernie lives and dies not because of Jack Black’s performance as the assistant funeral director (still a career-high), but because of what the townspeople think of him. Linklater sets up a clear metaphor in the opening credits, which sees Bernie delicately making up a cadaver with the utmost patience and care. “You cannot have grief tragically become a comedy,” he tells his class as he glues a mouth shut. When the camera cuts, Black tosses off his latex gloves to reveal an onlooking group of aspiring morticians. What do they make of this Gomez Addams-looking man on stage?

As Bernie, Black is all things to all people. He helps locals with taxes, directs school plays, and, when a funeral lacks eulogizers, he sings “Amazing Grace” better than anyone. Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) is his inverse and the perfect noir victim. A wealthy widow murdered by her loyal mustachioed valet was even a plot on Mad Men two years later. But whatever Bernie’s intentions for Marjorie are muddied by perspectives.

Linklater loves a point of view, and he delivers in abundance with Bernie, offering perspectives by way of reenactments of the crime and talking head interviews from Carthage District Attorney Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey) and the people of Carthage, some played by actors, some by actual residents. The townspeople praise Bernie’s kindness and willingness to go the extra mile for the bereaved. But early on, Linklater includes a scene where Bernie upsells customers on deluxe caskets with warranties, as if they will return a coffin. It’s a crucial scene that allows for a modicum of suspicion about his motives, priming us for Danny Buck’s position: Bernie is not like the rest of Carthage—he is an outsider.

Bernie isn’t a movie about solving a crime. We know Bernie did it. He confessed. The movie is about how the nicest guy in town could’ve done this and why some people refused, and still refuse, to believe it. The townspeople have their reasons, ranging from the reductive (he’s too “effeminate”) to excusatory (“It’s not as bad as people say it is. He only shot her four times, not five.”). Preachers in town encouraged their flock to pray for Bernie, who covered up a murder for nine months as he threw his victim’s money around town. Even that isn’t without its complications. As Bernie was paying off his neighbors’ cars, he was woefully behind on his own payments. “He was a shopaholic,” one townsperson diagnoses.

To accommodate these POVs, Linklater employs a mockumentary style. But the movie isn’t aiming for the faux-realism of This Is Spinal Tap; it’s attempting to muddy the truth of the situation, blending fact and fiction. By casting actual townspeople and local actors, Linklater imbues these interviews with an authentic charisma different from mannered Hollywood actors, which is why McConaughey’s sudden appearance is so jarring. After all these real people, we have an actor in costume, not a townsperson in their everyday clothes. Kudos to the casting department, because that’s what Danny Buck ends up being: Carthage’s sore thumb.

These “interviews” prevent the comedy from ever fully becoming a tragedy. For example, Sonny Carl Davis’ explanation of the map of Texas prepares us for their perspective: Folksy, funny, and deeply behind the Pine Curtain. The way he tosses off, “Of course, I forgot the Panhandle, and most people do,” is an excellent bit of regional commentary that communicates so much about this guy. Other lines from townspeople, like, “If her nose were any higher, she’d drown in a rainstorm,” show off their humor and values. As we’ll see, those values are unshakable.

Throughout the film, Danny Buck operates as the voice of reason, reminding the hungry patrons of Danny’s BBQ and Catfish (“You kill it, I’ll cook it”) that there’s no ambiguity. Bernie killed this woman. The audience knows this because Linklater showed it.

In the middle of the film, trading the bright East Texas sun for a chilly garage straight out of Fargo, Bernie casually, almost mindlessly, fires four rounds into Marjorie’s back. Again, reminding us that it wasn’t entirely without intent, editor Sandra Adair inserts a close-up of Marjorie annoyingly chewing her food, one of Bernie’s pet peeves, as he fires.

To the townspeople who do think Bernie killed her, it’s easy to explain: He snapped. Just as Hit Man’s Gary Johnson can suddenly transform into a thespian, Bernie could become a killer. However, keeping an old lady buried under chicken parts and ground beef in a deep freeze for nine months is hardly becoming for the gentlest man in town. Nevertheless, Bernie benefitted from the town’s opinion of Marjorie. With her gone, he could give his time (and her money) back to the community.

The townspeople are the most vital element of the case because it took leaving Carthage to get a conviction. “I had never heard of the state seeking a change of venue because the defendant was so well-liked that they couldn’t get a conviction,” says Bernie’s lawyer, Scrappy Holmes (Brady Coleman). “When I heard that the judge had actually agreed to move the trial, to give in to Danny Buck’s hare-brained request, my first thought was, ‘Oh shit, Bernie’s ox is in a ditch.’” Finally free of the spell Bernie cast upon Carthage, Buck succeeded.

Because Bernie and Marjorie are the only two perspectives we don’t hear, we can form our own thoughts about him. Black, a consummate showman with an urge to make people smile visible at all times, pulls back a bit, becoming a cipher for the townspeople’s opinions, playing into both sides. Is he a calculating evil actor, or was he temporarily insane? More importantly, if murder can’t change the way we see someone, what could? These questions are what makes Bernie so unique. Linklater forces the viewer to have an opinion of him that is at odds with itself, like grief tragically becoming a comedy. Is the nicest guy you know capable of murder? Yes. Just don’t ask anyone in Carthage.