No, this has nothing to do with Bernie Sanders. It was a film that I added to our list after a regular on Broken Forum commented about what a unique film it is and that it’ll make converts out of anybody who doubts that Jack Black can act. Plus it was directed by Richard Linklater who as my wife noted can be amazingly creative about finding original ways to tell stories. Boyhood and the Before series are the usual examples, but this is also the director who made really bizarre things like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

Here, Jack Black plays Bernie Tiede, a mortician who lives in the small town of Carthage in Texas. Through a series of interviews, the local residents recount the story of how Bernie as he is affectionately known to all and sundry arrived in their town and added a touch of sunshine to everyone’s lives. With his genuine faith that everyone deserves a good funeral ceremony, his ability to connect and make friends with everyone and his ability to sing and dance making him a leading light in both the local church and the local theatre troupe, no one has a bad word to say about Bernie. At the opposite extreme is the wealthy and recently widowed Marjorie Nugent who is thoroughly hated by the entire town. Bernie is undeterred by her initial hostility and soon becomes her only friend. He eventually becomes her constant travel companion, sole confidante and right-hand man.

The mockumentary format creates distance between the audience and Bernie so we never directly see what he’s thinking. Between the residents’ constant praise for Bernie, their disdain for Marjorie and interviews with Matthew McConaughey playing the local district attorney Danny Buck, you know something is going to happen but the film deliberately leaves you uncertain about what that is. Is Bernie as earnest and sincere as everyone believes or is he running a long con of some kind? Is the director in Bernie’s camp or is he mocking everyone including the townspeople? This film defies genre conventions and its unpredictability is part of its charm.

Jack Black is so essential to the film that it’s hard to imagine this quirky vision being able to work without him. Equally important however are the residents of this little town in Texas. Just as Fargo was a showcase for the eccentricities and folksiness of the mid-western United States, Bernie uses the gossipy and religious nature of this small town for great effect. It helps that Bernie makes for such an incongruous hero in Texas: effeminate and perhaps secretly homosexual, he disdains sports and instead happily teaches dancing and cooking. I particularly loved how they use a map near the beginning of the film to show where exactly Carthage is and how Texas can really be divided into different countries, populated by radically different peoples. There’s also how disdainfully the people of Carthage look upon those of San Augustine, only 50 miles away.

I only realized at the end of the film that Bernie Tiede is a real person and that this was based on a true story. I think it’s integral to this film that it doesn’t have the usual “based on a true story” line at its beginning as the character of Bernie here has obviously been fictionalized to a high degree. And yet Linklater muddies fact and fiction by having the interviews that comprise so much of the film be real people who live in Carthage and who knew the real Bernie. Admittedly that makes this film even more bizarre and I’m uncomfortable with that, especially since it seems to have played a role in getting the case reexamined by the courts. As a highly entertaining piece of dark humor, I find Bernie to be fantastic and impressively original but I do wish that it was only inspired by real events and had not sought to represent itself as the truth in any way.