Bernie

Logline: In small-town Texas, the local mortician strikes up a friendship with a wealthy widow, though when he kills her, he goes to great lengths to create the illusion that she's alive.

Cast: Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine

Directed by: Richard Linklater

I decided to take Monday off because I had a crazy weekend and I needed a recovery day just to get some rest. That, and I didn't get a chance to watch anything new on the weekend.

So last night, I turned 0n this Indie film. Bernie. I was intrigued by the trailer and coming from the director of Dazed and Confused, I couldn't help myself.

Summary

Bernie Tiede is everyone's helping hand when a loved one passes away. He goes to great lengths to make people feel better while they are mourning. He knows all the right things to say and all the right gifts to bring. This is what Bernie does.

Then one day, one funeral, Bernie falls for the character of Marjorie Nugent, a widow in which Bernie is trying to make feel better. She kind of has no one left, she's getting older, so Bernie is convenient. Well... Bernie actually ends up killing this person. Their relationship becomes abusive and she keeps putting him down, so, he kills her. This is the story of how he covers it up.

Review

I couldn't take it.

This is the first movie that I'm reviewing in which I didn't make it to the end. You may ask, well, what the hell? Why not just review an oldie like Blade Runner or go see The Bourne Legacy? #1 I've had no time for Bourne, #2 throwbacks are for Thursday and #3 I will have a review for The Campaign tomorrow as today is half-priced Tuesday. 

I am reviewing this movie because quite frankly, I have a lot to discuss about it.

Bernie is filmed using a different template than most other movies. It's kind of like a book in the sense that it's told in chapters. Overlays show up on screen portraying captions like: "Who is Bernie?" or, "Was Bernie Gay?" And then the following sequences would go to great lengths to answer that question. When I say "great" lengths, I really mean to say LONG lengths. It's different, sure, but I hated it. So much so that I turned it off with no intentions of turning it back on. 

Topic of the Day

The first thing I want to address in my TOTD is why Bernie didn't work with this format.

Bernie falls under the genre of comedy. It's also based off an article in a magazine on a story that happened in reality, although the movie never begins with that statement.

When making a comedy, filmmakers shouldn't assume that people are going to like their humor. Even if you've made something great in the past like Dazed and Confused you can't base your movie on the fact that an audience will watch your film in its entirety because they're going to be laughing. You have to take into account that people will vary as to what's funny and what isn't. That being said, you need to suck an audience in with formatted storytelling and clear character development.

Bernie does neither. The story is told through people who live in Carthage, Texas. Pretty much 80% of the first 40 minutes is told through narration by these people. The chapter of "Who is Bernie?" feels like it's 20 minutes long - and then to find out if he was gay feels somewhat of the same. Every character needs to have backstory, so diving into that subject isn't the worst thing a writer can do. But when you take 20 minutes to point out that Bernie is an overly kind, loving, and caring mortician - you risk losing part of your audience that isn't enjoying the humor. That stuff should only take a few moments. Stories always need to be moving forward in a comedy - NO MATTER WHAT. If you sit in a stagnant position where nothing is happening, no goals are created, and you're just describing things through townspeople about a certain someone, people who don't find the comedy funny are going to be BORED.

Bernie doesn't have any decent goals. Not for the first 40 minutes before he kills Marjorie anyway. I wouldn't count being in a relationship with Marjorie as a goal - that's not good enough to keep an audience interested in this kind of movie. My point being, it took 40 minutes or so for Bernie to actually get his first goal of the movie - cover up the death of Marjorie Nugent - stakes being that if he gets caught, he goes to prison for life. Now, that sounds like a good movie. Hell, that's the logline. I would have watched that. But, when it took 40 minutes or so to get there - I was already so bored of what I was watching I really didn't care. I had no interest in what happened to Bernie. I still don't.

Don't stagnate plot & character goals while telling backstory - do it as the story is being told. It should never take as long as Bernie did to introduce a character and get to the logline. Don't rely purely on comedy to keep your audience interested, keep the story moving forward. Don't let your character go without flaws until his first goal either (if it's going to take this long to get to the logline) because having no conflict is boring. I found these were the common mistakes that Bernie made.

Consensus

Bernie has scored highly on Rotten Tomatoes & decently on IMDb; this actually made me more excited to press play. My only concern was that Jack Black was playing the lead - and we all know how that's been working out lately. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my expectations of him were wrong - I felt he did a great job at not acting like his normal self. It was the story format and the lack of flow to the plot that made me ultimately turn this off. I really, really, didn't like it. 

3/10