"If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it": Richard Linklater on Bernie, gossip, death and Texas

Richard Linklater’s fourteenth feature chronicles the strange but true tale of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the young man who arrived in Carthage, Texas with some neatly pressed shirts and pants, a smart little moustache, a gift for politeness and a mortuary degree, and Mrs. Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), the crabby, extremely wealthy old widow loathed by everyone in town. Bernie and Mrs. Nugent became close companions, so close that, despite Bernie’s apparent homosexuality, many wondered if their relationship didn’t include a sexual component. But that relationship became increasingly oppressive for Bernie, and one day in 1997 Bernie shot and killed Mrs. Nugent, hiding her body in a freezer. No one discovered her for nine months.

Inspired by Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 Texas Monthly profile of the case, which much of the film quotes directly (Hollandsworth is credited as co-scenarist), Bernie comfortably hovers somewhere between semi-staged documentary and true crime feature. It’s a black comedy and place study narrated by a chorus of townsfolk (the cast mixes actual Carthagians and hired actors, including a very funny Matthew McConaughey) speaking direct-to-camera from front stoops or greasy spoons or seated before farm equipment. Their Bernie is a Robin Hood figure, killing the rich and donating to the town: murder as a benevolent act. “He had the ability to make the world seem kind,” one of the locals says. Linklater, a Texan himself, exudes affection for his subjects and their things (check out the attention to detail in the set dressing, ie: the horse painting lampshade on Scrappy Holmes’ desk). Told from the inside out, Bernie neither condescends nor soft-pedals, and seems ever-fascinated by its own incongruities and enigmas.

Richard Linklater 

I’d never spoke to Linklater before but found him just as friendly and easygoing as I’d always assumed he’d be from watching his films, some of which feature an occasional director’s cameo. He appears in Bernie as a deadbeat dad engaged in one of those weird contests where you have to keep your hands on a car for as long as possible. 

JB: I realize that the film is called Bernie, but I was really struck by how beautifully it works as a portrait of a community.

Richard Linklater: When Shirley first read the script she said to me, “Really, it’s the gossips’ movie.” I laughed. To some degree that’s true, because it’s seen through their eyes.

JB: That’s just it. The film refrains from psychoanalyzing Bernie. It offers little about his roots. It doesn’t try to get inside his head. Instead you build your portrait as much as possible from the perceptions of the Carthagians. You let them author your Bernie.

RL: We’ll never know what really happened between Bernie and Mrs. Nugent, but we do know the effect their relationship had on Carthage. It always seemed like the most interesting choice to hear these multiple voices testify to how the events reverberated through the community. Such events are more poignant in a small town, because everyone really does know each other. Small town gossip has this unanimity to it: Bernie was the nicest guy in town and Mrs. Nugent was the meanest bitch. Life is high school. Ultimately you are what everybody says you are. If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it—without getting caught.

JB: For all the movies that have been made in Texas, I feel like very few have paid close attention to a sense of place, to how it really feels to live there. I think of The Whole Shootin’ Match...

RL: [Laughs] Speaking of Sonny Carl Davis! You know Sonny Carl is in Bernie, right?

JB: I had no idea.

RL: He’s the guy with the map of Texas.

JB: Holy shit. I didn’t recognize him.

RL: Well, it has been 34 years since Whole Shootin’ Match. He’s a real character. I’m glad I finally got to work with him. He’s one of a handful of actors that I mixed in with the, quote-unquote, real people.

JB: One of the really intriguing things about this whole story is the way the theme of disguise and the denial of death weaves its way through Bernie’s vocation and right into his crime.

RL: Even in death we disguise ourselves. There’s that telling line from the opening scene, where Bernie’s demonstrating his craft: “You don’t want him to look unhappy to be there.” Put a little smile on the dead man’s face, you know? [Laughs] I heard that from a lady who dresses the dead as her job. She was our consultant, giving me some pointers. I thought it was hilarious. I don’t think she thought it was funny.

JB: The casting of Jack Black struck me as really inspired. He’s very funny as Bernie, but he also has this quality, this very particular pathos, that feels both native to the character and distinctly Jack Black.

RL: I’m so proud of Jack’s work here. When you’re funny no one thinks you’re a good actor, but the truth is Jack’s a great actor. And a great singer. And both skills are required for this part. It’s hard to think of other actors who could bring all these things, the right kind of charm. Jack has this ingratiating element; he wants to be liked. But then there’s this tinge somewhere in Jack that’s a little off. This edge. That edge itself is funny. It’s forever intriguing. That’s what makes him a movie star.  

JB: You’ve been carrying around this idea since 1998. Did your concept of the film change a lot over the years?

RL: Not much. All I did the whole time was think about the tone, and that was beneficial. Everything clicked when we met the actual Bernie. I had been writing to him for years, but when Jack and I got to visit him in prison and spend some serious time, it kind of confirmed my hunches about Bernie. He truly did seem like the nicest guy who did this one horrible act. To me, that was the story. He’s not a psychopath, so the question arises as to whether any of us, under the right circumstances, could be driven to kill somebody. 

JB: The scene where Bernie pulls the trigger really isn’t especially dramatic. It’s just this moment where the barrier between fantasy and action becomes so slim.

RL: And it’s so easy with certain weapons. It happens in a flash.

JB: Have you given any thought to whether you’d like to be buried or cremated? Would you like someone like Bernie to prepare your remains for your grieving loved ones?

RL: [Laughs] That’s a great question. You’re first person to ask me that! I’ve spent all these years thinking about the death industry and you’re the only person to ask me that question. So I’ll tell you honestly, because you deserve it: I will in no way let the death industry get close to me when I die! [Laughs] I’ve been researching this and there’s this thing called green burial. You die, they put you in a biodegradable stack, bury you vertically so you don’t take up much room and you immediately return to the soil. You don’t kill a bunch of roots. They just throw you out in the woods, really. It’s the least you do can do and it only costs about $200. Not $10,000. The idea of putting all these fluids in your body and going through all this rigmarole to act like you’re not dead is just crazy. It’s a horrible industry, really. So expensive. They treat the bodies like shit. There are these companies where you go to the funeral home and then they ship the bodies to Mexico immediately because it’s $75 cheaper. It’s ridiculous.

JB: I know. This whole idea that you can buy a casket that will keep worms off your body for an extra hundred years. At some point, when the people that loved you and even all your grandchildren have all died, you know, maybe it’s time to finally let go. I’ve always liked the idea of cremation, though I hadn’t really thought about the pollution aspect.

RL: That’s an issue. And it’s expensive because of the fire and because they still do all these things to treat the body beforehand. Mind you, they make you think you have to do so many things but if you check the books there’s actually very little that you’re obligated to do, legally.

JB: Well, I hope that neither you nor your loved ones will have to be thinking about your death rites for a very long time. 

RL: Thanks, but we all get there sooner or later. Thinking about it’s not so bad. 

2009: The year in DVD

There were countless great movies released on DVD in 2009, so what follows isn’t “the best” of them so much as the ones that seemed to cry out most urgently for a wider audience, some quite old, some unjustly forgotten, some previously ill-served on video, all of them very much worth your while.

The Whole Shootin’ Match
Gorgeously packaged and generously supplemented, Watchmaker’s release of Eagle Pennell’s lost 1978 debut reminds us how seldom we see resonant stories from the vast America existing between the costal metropolises. Alternately despicable and deeply endearing, old pals Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman—who was sadly murdered in his Austin home earlier this year—are forever stumbling between get-rich-quick schemes and humbling disasters, between bouts of drunken revelry and bursts of terrifying lucidity. Theirs is a rambling, fumbling, comically inspired waltz across Texas.


Husbands
Another chronicle of male friendship by turns appalling and touching, this 1970 feature is among the best of John Cassavetes, the father of modern American independent film. Following the death of their fourth musketeer, Peter Falk, Cassavetes and Ben Gazarra undertake one long, lost, wasted weekend, getting as far as England before they even realize what the hell happened.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Criterion’s typically deluxe release of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 ultra-slow-building, devastating debut about three days in the life of a single mother and prostitute is impeccably preserved and encourages hypnotic revisits. Its observance of everyday banalities is so exacting and immersive as to make high drama of the smallest event, and to invite compassion and repulsion in equal measure. It also makes you wonder if Delphine Seyrig isn’t one of the great unheralded actresses of cinema history.

The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert

Two crowning achievements from Luis Buñuel's prolific and under-appreciated Mexican period, the former (1962) finds Mexico City's snotty elite huddling together inexplicably in a house that they just can't seem to leave, while the latter (65) is an outrageously bizarre biopic about a saint who has to contend with Silvia Pinal's Satanic minx tempting him from his pedestal in the desert. It ends with them trapped in a cabaret where young folks gyrate to a dance called 'Radioactive Flesh.' I'm definitely performing a reenactment this New Year's Eve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When you spend as much time as I do compulsively gazing at the young, handsome, sleepy-eyed face of Robert Mitchum in his many films of the 1940s and 50s, it comes as something of a shock to see him as the palpably world-weary protagonist in Peter Yates’ wonderfully detailed, downbeat, Boston-based crime drama, originally released in 1973 and newly resurrected from oblivion by our dear friends at Criterion. Mitchum’s so damned good here as the titular gunrunner trying to retire, one more shifting point in the film’s wintry geometry of crime and punishment.


The Walking Dead
The diamond hiding in Warner’s otherwise pretty negligible Karloff and Lugosi Horror Classics box, this melancholy tale, released in 1936, of a lonely man framed and sent to chair, only to be resurrected and thus able to exact his revenge, is endowed with far more poetry than its generic premise would have you believe, thanks in part to director Michael Curtiz and in part to Boris Karloff, one the true greats, who makes us believe in a sadness that follows us beyond the grave.


A Matter of Life and Death
The astonishingly beautiful use of Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece is only one reason to own this sublime Sony reissue. A fantastical romance perched on the edge of mortality—one sufficiently attuned to the strange workings of the mind as to garner accolades from Oliver Sacks—it finds a British WWII pilot tumbling to earth and miraculously surviving, only to be shot heavenward by his love for an American radio operator. Will the celestial tribunal allow this trans-Atlantic couple to stay together?

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1
The Sniper (1952), The Lineup (58), Murder By Contract (58): none had been on DVD before, and every one of them is a gem, encapsulating much of what was thrilling, fascinating, daring, and deliciously nasty about the final years of the classic noir cycle. Add Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (53) into the mix and you’ve got yourself one of the best noir collections ever released. Your image of genteel 1950s America will never be the same.


Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura
Among the most woefully under-represented of Japanese directors in the West, Shohei Imamura was lovingly devoted to the seedy, the undigested, the vulgar, and the desperate masses living at the bottom of the social totem pole, a rather outrageous way to shape one's career in postwar Japan. This trio from Criterion are perhaps not my absolute favourites, but they're nonetheless crazily entertaining, terrifically perverse, often strangely beautiful tales of sex, murder, crime and obsession.

Men at Work: Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match and A Hell of a Note arrive on DVD

As the studio-backed auteur films of the 1970s climbed into the stratosphere, those delirious heights from which the whole heady shotgun wedding of art and commerce would soon come crashing down, another American cinema slowly emerged from the rich soil of the marginalized. Independent movies of this second golden age were so often “regional,” if not in geography than in spirit, showing us faces, places and activity typically ignored and doing so through an industrial model infinitely more modest than the one available to the movie brats who conquered Hollywood. These movies were made cheaply and required tireless work, often made on weekends between regular jobs over very long periods of time. Maybe that’s partly why so many of the lasting images of the independents from the 70s concern men at work. From Peter Falk’s convivial crew in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Henry Sanders’ inward abattoir labourer in Killer of Sheep (77), blue-collar life and the poles of wild times and desperate dreams of transcendence it engenders found a new and often exhilarating level of expression. Yet one of the most indelible and entertaining examples of the working man’s movie, one that’s genuinely regional in every sense of the term—save racially—has been long forgotten and is only now making a celebrated return.

Watchmaker Film has lovingly packaged the first DVD release of The Whole Shootin’ Match (78), the feature debut of a scrawny Texan named Eagle Pennell, accompanied by A Hell of a Note (77), his 25-minute dry run which showcases the same inspired comic pairing of actors Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. Authenticity is a precarious word to throw around when discussing movies, but if we invoke it to describe how temperament and tendencies reflect content, than Pennell’s the real thing. He told stories about strangely lovable—and occasionally detestable—losers, dreamers and drinkers whose shaggy charm could never be accused of benefiting from excess polish. And these films, reputedly constructed from single takes, sometimes under-lit, sometimes overexposed, radiate ramshackle enthusiasm. There are bits of humour in Pennell’s work, not to mention certain images of vast landscapes or gloomy bars, that are so instantly winning, yet they’d never satisfy the technical or storytelling standards of even the most slouching film academy. They exude faith in the pleasures of watching human behaviour and in only the most mundane forms of catharsis, blotchy black and white and boom shadows be damned. Their narratives are the narratives of country songs, and they speak to the inner life of the labourer. In one memorable scene, a character watches a movie and sincerely wonders what the director does for a living.

A Hell of a Note announces the sense of flow that is Pennell’s modus operandi. It’s first sequence finds Davis and Perryman resigning from roof tarring in a marvelously fluid gesture: they both whip it out and piss on the as-yet un-tarred roof, their streams of urine converging into a creeping puddle heading strait toward the boots of their cranky and imminently former employer. They then head to a bar to drown sorrows, meet girls, get in awesomely awkward fights, dance, and ponder new opportunities. A sudden injection of tragedy brings it all to a grinding halt, but most of A Hell of a Note is cyclical and un-dramatic, the sense of inevitability kept buoyant by often sublime gags and an endearing undercurrent of friendship declared.

This is even more the case with The Whole Shootin’ Match, which features no such tragic conclusion but rather builds up to a moment of clarity, or at least as close to one as this hillbilly Hope and Crosby can hope to approximate. Loyd (Perryman) and Frank (Davis) have evidently been pals a long while, having collaborated in a number of failed get-rich-quick schemes, everything from a flying squirrel farm to the chinchilla business. Things kick off as Loyd proposes another dazzling new enterprise: polyurethane. Hang onto your hats.

The distinctions between Perryman and Davis’ characters are more pronounced here. Loyd is the persistent optimist and inventor. One of my favourite scenes conveys Loyd’s silent glee over his crafting of a spinning wand that makes bubbles. Frank is the philandering family man whose innate cheerfulness and obvious love of Loyd keep him within safe distance of depression and complete alcoholic collapse. As the story ambles on its way, with more bars, fights, dancing, drinking and working en route, Loyd and Frank are teased by success when Loyd’s new super-mop—he has a revelation in an automated car wash—gets picked up by a local manufacturer who gives them a whopping $1000 just for signing a contract. You can probably guess how things turn out. The final sequence finds them looking for Indian treasure in the hills outside Austin and coming to what feels like some sort of fork in the road, even if neither of them is entirely cognizant of the fact.

Perryman and Davis embody the dreams of those Americans who feel alienated by the larger society they inhabit yet never stop trying, in that deeply American way, to beat the system. Pennell connected with his characters so strongly that his own story came to resemble theirs even as he revealed an artistic vision never granted to them. Pennell nurtured a legend of failed potential all too aligned with his body of work, and he died, following years of drinking, professional and personal self-sabotage, and even intermittent homelessness, in July of 2002. He was just shy of 50. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around long enough to see what sort of success his good ol’ boys would achieve. His best work survives and will continue to do so.