Butler's Cinema Scene

“BERNIE” My rating:  B (Opening wide on May 25)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

We so often see Jack Black going “big” in broad comic performances that it’s easy to forget that this is an actor capable of great subtlety.

Certainly it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job than he does in “Bernie,”  Richard Linklater’s based-on-fact study of a small-town eccentric now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison.

Bernie Tiede (Black) is a church-going, giving, glad-handing funeral director who comes to tiny  Carthage, Texas, in the late 1980s and quickly became one of the town’s most visible and beloved citizens.

The sort of guy who goes  the extra mile for his fellows, Bernie befriends local dowager and recent widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a rich witch so disagreeable that one local describes her as capable of “ripping you a two-bedroom, double-wide asshole.”

Soon they’re the town’s odd couple. Bernie becomes Marjorie’s closest (only) friend; they travel the world together. He runs her errands. She buys him clothes. He becomes her confidant.  She gives Bernie her power of attorney.

Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black

But there are cracks in the relationship. Majorie becomes ever more angry and demanding. Poor Bernie can barely find an hour to devote to the local amateur theater he so loves. The stress builds.

And then Marjorie vanishes.

All this is told by writer/director Linklater (“Before Sunrise,” “Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock”) in a most intriguing and entertaining manner. “Bernie” is narrated by the citizens of Carthage,  who regale us with on-camera stories, wise-acre comments, pithy observations, rumors and such a big dose of Texas ethos that you can’t separate the professional actors from the everyday folk. Think “Sordid Lives” with a cast of dozens.

“Bernie” is a black comedy peppered with references to other movies, especially Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman” (gay man coexists with gullible small town rednecks).

And  Black’s performance holds it all together.

There are moments here when Black seems to be channeling Grady Sutton, the plump “sissy” actor of Hollywood’ Golden Era. But this performance is no caricature. Bernie’s effeminacy is just below the surface and so carefully tamped down that no one in town is sure of his sexuality.

Matthew McConaughey

Moreover, we find ourselves in the same boat as Carthage’s citizens. Queer or not, we like this guy.

An ambitious district attorney (Matthew McConaughey, who seems always to give his best performances for fellow Texan Linklater) attempts to paint Bernie Tiede as a cold-blooded, social-climbing, calculating con artist. But such is the power of Bernie’s persona that we see him more as a victim than a perpetrator, as a do-gooder burnt by his own altruism.

The cynic in me suspects that “Bernie” will fall between the cracks precisely because it’s not a typical Jack Black performance. (Thank God!) But years from now it will be celebrated as one of his finest moments.

| Robert W. Butler