Bernie (2011) comes to Carthage

Small town Texas, a true crime story told like a languid Sunday afternoon conversation over sweet tea. Richard Linklater's Bernie has Jack Black slowly rolling into the town and finding a job as the assistant mortician at a funeral home in Carthage, TX.

The movie is the real-life story of Bernie Tiede, the beloved assistant funeral director of Carthage and his unlikely friendship with the town's most despised wealthy widow, Marjorie Nugent. Linklater treats this bizarre true story with his signature unhurried grace - life unfolds naturally, meandering like those East Texas back roads, revealing character through accumulation rather than exposition.

Jack Black disappears into Bernie with such completeness that you forget you're watching Jack Black. He embodies this paradox of a man - devoutly Christian, genuinely kind and impossibly generous. Then he has an unexpected glitch in his personality which makes this story a story. Shirley MacLaine captures Marjorie's brittle cruelty with precision, showing us exactly why an entire town could hate one lonely old woman. The genius move here is Linklater's use of actual Carthage residents as a Greek chorus, commenting on the events with the kind of unvarnished Texas frankness that no screenwriter could manufacture. These aren't actors playing small-town Texans, these *are* small-town Texans, and their authenticity grounds this strange tale in something achingly real. I thought there was a Somerset Maugham quality to it all, if Maugham had traded colonial Asia for the American South. That same keen eye for human contradiction, the understanding that people contain multitudes and morality exists in shades we'd rather not acknowledge. Bernie loved that town. The town loved Bernie. And then a thing happened...

What stays with you isn't the action itself but the uncomfortable questions about justice, loyalty, and whether goodness can be measured by a single terrible moment or by decades of genuine kindness. Linklater never judges, he simply observes, and trusts us to sit with the complexity.

Like the entire populace of Carthage, I too loved Bernie, didn't at all like the character Matthew McConaughey portrayed in this movie - Danny Buck as was intended by the director. Anyway who can hate Jack Black, right?