Screened as part of NZIFF 2012

Bernie 2011

Directed by Richard Linklater

“Jack Black gives the performance of his career, under the pitch-perfect direction of his School of Rock director, Richard Linklater, who expertly crafts a black comedy with a deceptively sunny surface.” — NY Post

USA In English
104 minutes 35mm

Producers

Richard Linklater
,
Ginger Sledge

Screenplay

Richard Linklater
,
Skip Hollandsworth

Photography

Dick Pope

Editor

Sandra Adair

Music

Graham Reynolds

With

Jack Black (Bernie Tiede)
,
Shirley MacLaine (Marjorie Nugent)
,
Matthew McConaughey (Danny Buck)
,
Brady Coleman (Scrappy Holmes)
,
Richard Robichaux (Lloyd Hornbuckle)
,
Rick Dial (Don Leggett)
,
Brandon Smith (Sheriff Huckabee)
,
Larry Jack Dotson (Rev Woodard)
,
Merrilee McCommas (Molly)

Festivals

London 2011
,
SXSW, San Francisco 2012

Reunited with his School of Rock director Richard Linklater, Jack Black has his best-ever role and meets it with inspiration and amazing restraint. Playing a real-life, world-famous-in-Texas character (you can see Black meet him if you stay for the credits) he provides a wonderfully full portrait of a closeted small-town guy who has sunk his enormous personality into round-the-clock, upbeat, apple-pie niceness. Blessed with a golden singing voice, attentive to anniversaries, generous with gifts, Bernie Tiede was an assistant undertaker so popular with the old ladies of Carthage, Texas, that when he confessed to murdering one of their number, nobody in town was prepared to listen. And if he did it, they say, victim Marjorie Nugent (a sour, purse-clutching Shirley MacLaine) had it coming.

The fun is in the details and the way Linklater kids the notion that Bernie = community spirit. An East Texas native himself, Linklater has enlisted actual townspeople to provide pungent opinion and unreliable commentary in a mock-doc fashion no sane outsider would contemplate. Matthew McConaughey as the county prosecutor looks great in a Stetson and cuts a scathing dash through the protestations of Marjorie’s defamers and Bernie’s fans. — BG

“Black sings, dances and charms his way around a character whose larger-than-life personality almost demands parody. Yet the wonder of Black’s performance here is its empathy and balance: inasmuch as he can disappear into any role, he dissolves into this one with no hint of mocking remove. It’s a beautiful thing to see… Shamelessly predisposed toward its subject, Bernie is an eccentric delight.” — Jeannette Catsoulis, NPR