A Tribute to 2012 Movies, Part 2: Bernie and The True Beginning of 'The McConnaissance'

 

Throughout Matthew McConaughey’s run to his Academy Award for Best Actor, the phrase that both he and the presenters kept saying was: “Alright, alright, alright.” No one needed clarification. After all, that iconic line had been associated with McConaughey since his breakthrough performance in the landmark comedy Dazed and Confused which had been released exactly twenty years prior to McConaughey’s Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.

By that point, ‘The McConaissance’ was in full bloom. There have been many people to this day who seem to think that as fine as McConaughey’s performance in Dallas Buyers Club, he essentially won because around the same time as Oscar season was warming up, the legendary first season of True Detective was debuting on HBO. To this day, viewers are still uncertain as to the overall quality of the series as a whole and the first season in general: what has never been denied by anybody is the extraordinary work by McConaughey as Rust Cohle, one of the most iconic characters in the 2010s. Watching every moment of McConaughey from his legendary description of ‘Time is a flat circle’ and every single interaction he had with his brother-in-arms Woody Harrelson, it remains one of the greatest performances of the entire decade. The fact McConaughey lost the Emmy to Bryan Cranston that year was entirely due to a flaw in HBO’s own branding: while the series was essentially an anthology series, they labeled it as a drama instead and McConaughey ending up going home empty-handed, which would be a travesty had it not been for the fact that the final season of Breaking Bad had cemented itself in the pantheon of greatest television of all time and an Emmy for Cranston was practically inevitable.

Leaving aside whether True Detective helped lead McConaughey to the Oscar (a case that has been bolstered by Mahershala Ali winning his second Oscar the same year as he starred in the third installment of the series) is the fact that the year before the ‘McConaissance was already in full bloom. In fact had the supporting category not been so ridiculously front loaded in 2012, there is a very real chance McConaughey could have taken an Oscar home for either of the two films he made that year.

McConaughey had spent the last several years walking away from the brainless rom-coms he had spent the previous decade making. In 2011, he had starred as a hit man in the NC-17 rated Killer Joe where he agrees to kill a man in exchange for sex with the virgin sister of the man who hired him. That year, he had also played the lead role in Mud, a film by the brilliant indie director Jeff Nichols, a fugitive trying to avoid two vigilantes on his trail. Of course the most famous role he had was in the legendary Magic Mike,  Steven Soderbergh’s now classic film about male strippers. The movie should have been considered something of a joke from the start but the absolute visceral nature of the performance’s – McConaughey’s in particular – made it go above the exploitive nature of the movie.

Indeed, throughout 2012 it seemed more a question of which film McConaughey would get his first Oscar nomination for rather than if. Indeed, that year he won the Best Supporting Actor prize from both the New York Film Critics and the National Film Critics Society for his performances in Magic Mike and Bernie. It is just as likely that so many great performance caused the Oscars to do what they do so many times and split the vote for the films, and that as well as the high quality of the other nominees, led McConaughey to go home with nothing. He had a measure of revenge though, when the Independent Spirit Awards gave him their Best Supporting Male prize for Magic Mike.

It is interesting that he won the prize for that film because Bernie, his other major role, was the movie that got more recognition from the Independent Spirit awards: it received nominations for Best Film and Best Lead Male for Jack Black. And honestly, it would have been more fitting for McConaughey to win for that movie as it was directed by Richard Linklater, the director of Dazed and Confused.

Linklater, like McConaughey, is from Texas and is one of the greatest filmmakers in history as well as one of the hardest to quantify. He has directed the Before Sunrise series, the lowest grossest trilogy in history and almost certainly the best. He has directed one of the most remarkable animated films of all time Waking Life, a movie that Roger Ebert considered one of the greatest ever made and that defies any summarization. McConaughey had worked with him. McConaughey and Ethan Hawke are among the most famous names who have worked with him constantly: they were two of the title Newton Boys the most famous bank robbing team in history and the reason you’ve never heard of them is because they got away with their crimes and lived to a ripe old age. He spent his career working in the independent film industry, but on the rare occasion he makes a big budget film they can be memorable: The School of Rock was one of the greatest children’s films of its era, eventually inspiring a Broadway musical and a Nick TV series,  something you would not expect from the man who also directed Me and Orson Welles.

Announcing Bernie as a nominated film, Black joked that when Linklater had come to him about another project, he had hoped it was School of Rock 2.. I don’t blame him; the film features one of Black’s greatest film performances. And I have to tell you while Black being attached to the project no doubt helped secure financing for the story Linklater planned to tell, I’m pretty sure not even Black could have imagined that when the film came out, you couldn’t imagine anyone other than him as the title character.

No one denies that Black is one of the great comic performers in history: the problem is he has spent far too much of his career doing work that is unworthy of him. For every High Fidelity, there is a Saving Silverman, for every Tropic Thunder, a Nacho Libre. Like Adam Sandler, Black is more than capable of giving performances that have depth that you wouldn’t expect of him – Peter Jackson’s King Kong  and Margot at the Wedding would more than demonstrate it -  but his exuberance always seemed better suited to his work in Tenacious D or animated films like the Kung Fu Panda franchise. Prior to starring in Bernie, his last two live action films had been Year One and the remake of Gulliver’s Travels – which certainly couldn’t have prepared anyone – certainly not the critics – for his work here.

The plot of Bernie has such bizarre characters as its leads and such a weird story that we know even without Linklater having to tell us that its true. Indeed, it is Linklater’s approach to the film that fundamentally confirms that. With the exceptions of Black, McConaughey and Shirley MacLaine, there are no other actors identified at the start of the movie. The film is intercut between scenes involving action with the three leads at the center of them and narration from residents of Carthage, the small Texas town where the events of the film takes place. It is not until the end credits roll that Linklater tells us which of people narrating events are actors and which are actually residents of Carthage that lived through everything that happen. I have to say part of me isn’t entirely certain that Linklater is entirely being fair with us; he has spent much of his career casting films with non-professionals to begin with that for all we know the ‘actors’ could have just been local Texas residents whose experience is in local theatre to begin with. It’s irrelevant to one’s enjoyment of the film because, like every character in a Linklater movie, he draws authenticity out of all of them.

Bernie Tiede is the pillar of the Carthage community. He sings in his local church choir; he directs high school productions and senior pageants. He is liked by everybody in town so much that when he eventually is tried for the crime he’s accused him, the DA has to move for a change of venue to find one because it would be more disposed to believe in the accused’s innocence.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Black’s performance is the way he channels his traditionally boisterous behavior into pure and utter niceness. He seems like a powerful personality but never an overbearing one. The closest you ever see to him cutting loose comes when he is singing ’76 Trombones’ in the rehearsal for a local production of The Music Man. The rest of the time he’s just pleasant and likable. You would say the only people he couldn’t like him are the dead, but since his job in Carthage is working in the town funeral home, you get the feeling he treats them with even more pleasantness than he does the living.

It is in that capacity that he meets Marjorie Nugent. Marjorie is almost certainly the most disliked woman in Carthage. Her husband was the president of the local bank and was apparently a prince of a man. When he passed away, she took over his job and began throwing loan applications in the wastebasket and offending everyone she meets from the moment they meet her. Bernie meets her at the funeral and behaves like a perfect angel to her.

Shirley MacLaine plays Marjorie absolutely perfectly. Ever since she won her Oscar for Terms of Endearment, she has been a master worker at the level of playing curmudgeonly women who a younger character manages to bring out the goodness in her. Bernie would seem to be the perfect person for this job except Marjorie seems to be the only living person Bernie has ever interacted with who has no heart. No one knows exactly what the real Bernie ever got out of his relationship with her. Throughout their relationship he never asks for anything at all, which may be what attracts someone as wealthy as Marjorie to him in particular. It wasn’t money, though every so often he suggests that she could occasionally spend more of it then she does. And it certainly isn’t sex, although one gossipy woman says they were on ‘a cruise together and were in bathing suits!”  The rest of Carthage doesn’t believe that’s the case, some because they think he’s a little ‘light in the loafers’ and some, like his co-worker, believe he was celibate. Perhaps one woman puts its best that the main reason Bernie stayed near her as long as she did was because he may very well have been the only person Marjorie ever met: “who was too nice to tell her to fuck off.”

At one point, the movie takes a time jump of a few years and at this point, the only person who tolerates Marjorie is Bernie and even his demeanor is starting to wilt. You have to hand it to MacLaine for creating a character so mean and spiteful that you’re actually rooting for Bernie to just kill her already. It’s a credit to Bernie that when he snaps about the last of what have to have been thousands of aggression over the years, he is immediately remorseful and bursts into tears.

It is worth noting that Linklater is very clear that no one discovered Marjorie’s death for as long as they did because everybody knew the victim and no one particularly missed her when she was gone. Bernie goes about his life as normal, keeps giving excuses that most people would see through if they actually gave a damn about the victim, and dismissing the people who worked for her with messages that seem out of character for him but perfectly in keeping with Marjorie. Nor does he spends beyond his means, indeed the only use he makes of Marjorie’s wealth is to redouble his charitable donations and help failing businesses. You really do get the feeling that if Bernie had confessed to killing Marjorie immediately afterward, he might have very well gotten a parade in his honor.

What eventually brings him down is the local district attorney Danny Buck (McConaughey). Everything Bernie is, Danny Buck isn’t. He is a ruthless politician who claims to be a devoted public servant but who everybody knows only cares about getting reelected. He is also the only character who narrates the story who we know for certain is an actor; he’s also the only person we see who clearly has an agenda from the start. While he clearly gets suspicious early on, you get the feeling this is the kind of thing Danny would let go of if this were an off-year.

McConaughey plays just generally likeable characters overall that its interesting to see that this movie as well as Magic Mike, showed just how well he could play utter heels. At a certain point when he discussing Bernie’s sexual history, he adds: “Three of his lovers were homosexuals.” He pauses. “Were.” You get a feeling in a town that is listed by one of the inhabitants as the ‘gateway to the South.’ This is what he finds the most contemptible about Bernie and what he hopes the others will too.

Certainly no one thanks him when Bernie is finally arrested: all of his donations are retracted and all the businesses he saved are foreclosed on. Perhaps that is another reason he wants a change of venue; if the citizens are too lenient towards the accused, they will definitely be too hostile towards his accuser.

It’s worth noting that Bernie is such a good person that he manages to keep up a perfect front all the way through the investigation, his arrest, and the trial. Even the verdict and sentence, as ridiculously harsh as it is (though not by Texas standards) only seems a momentary setback for him. The last time we see Bernie he seems to have moved on the best he can – certainly better than most of us would in this scenario.

After Bernie, Linklater released his masterpiece, the remarkable Boyhood a film that you can’t imagine any other writer-director making. An early favorite for Academy Awards, its momentum eventually curtailed and it lost Best Picture and Director to Birdman, a movie that for all its virtue seems more a recognition of an artistic trick than one of the humanity that Linklater did with his film.

This has not stopped Linklater in his path of making his brand of films that are only unlike in that they bear no resemblance to the previous one. After Boyhood came Everybody Wants Some!, his ‘spiritual sequel’ to Dazed and Confused. Late on came Where’d You Go, Bernadette, another bizarre true story centered on Cate Blanchett playing the title character. He is currently working on the film version of Stephen Sondheim’s cult musical Merrily We Roll Along. This musical famous unfolds backwards over a period of more than fifteen years, so naturally Linklater is filming it in real time starting at the end. His most recent film is another animated moving: Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood in which the grown up narrator is, of course, Jack Black. The film was nominated for Best Animated film by every critics group imaginable but didn’t get nominated for an Academy Award.

Linklater made his first film when he was thirty years old. He has written almost every film he has directed, created the South by Southwest film festival and is perhaps one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I remember a documentary about his films being airing on Showtime in the summer of 2014, right before Boyhood came out. It might have seemed humble considering that everyone might consider it his masterpiece. But Linklater no doubt would have argued its just another film. Unique among all of the movies he’s made, even his remake of The Bad News Bears, is that none of them is bad, or even mediocre expect perhaps by the high standards he sets without even having to try. Everyone says that they want to work with Spielberg or Scorsese but no one says that they want to work with Linklater. Perhaps because in their hearts of hearts, he has to see them in the role. Ending his rave for Bernie,  Roger Ebert says that anybody could have read the story that was the inspiration and known it was a natural movie. “His genius was to see Jack Black as Bernie Tiede,” something I don’t think even Black could have seen when he read the script.