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Bernie

BERNIE directed by Richard Linklater, screenplay by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth based on the magazine story by Hollandsworth. An Alliance Films release. 104 minutes. Opens Friday (May 18). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


Richard Linklater can’t get experimental often enough, for my money.

The projects that most inspire him – Slacker, Waking Life, the decade-spanning double feature of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset – bring out his playful, thoughtful side rather than the perfunctory craft behind The Newton Boys or that Bad News Bears remake. His studio work may fund the indie stuff, but with the exception of his buoyant family comedy School Of Rock, it’s rarely all that enjoyable.

Linklater’s latest, Bernie, is an indie and decidedly an experiment, appropriating the format of a true-crime documentary and wrapping it around extensive fictional recreations of the incident being discussed.

In interviews, various people from the East Texas town of Carthage tell the story of Bernie Tiede (pronounced “tee-dee”), a beloved local mortician who… well, he did something pretty bad. But then we see Bernie, played by Jack Black as a glad-handing, civic-minded fellow who fusses over the living and the dead with equal care and involves himself in church and community theatre. What could this guy possibly have done that was so terrible?

And then, very slowly, we find out, when a talking-head interview with an actual resident is followed by a recreation of the event. The recreation looks and feels like a proper motion picture – and in point of fact I suppose it is – but Linklater’s narrative strategy keeps the dramatic stuff from building any momentum. It’s constantly stopping and starting, backing up over itself to act out the anecdote that’s just been related to us.

Conceptually, it’s pretty involving for the first half-hour or so, as it traces Bernie’s relationship with wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent, played by Shirley MacLaine as a woman who’s spent so much time alone that her eccentricities have hardened into toxic character flaws.

The narrative spikes again once Matthew McConaughey enters the picture as district attorney Danny Buck Davidson, who would eventually prosecute Bernie for the aforementioned unpleasantness. But even there the movie has to stop so McConaughey, in character, can be interviewed about his suspicions and how he went about investigating them – and then there’s McConaughey-as-Buck in the re-enactment.

It probably sounded great in the pitch room, but as an actual experience it’s on the redundant side.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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