Bernie | Far Flungers | Roger Ebert
It looks like everybody is happy, but it isn't so. Mrs. Nugent becomes more possessive and abusive as the time goes by, and Bernie's daily routine is frequently disrupted by her constant demands. He naturally feels like being exhausted and suffocated, but he cannot leave her because it is against his good nature and principles. On one afternoon, he suddenly comes to the breaking point after he realizes he will never get away from her as long as she is alive, so….
What follows after that breaking point is a hilariously bizarre circumstance drenched with absurd black humor, so I let you discover how funny it is for yourself. The director/co-adapter Richard Linklater, whose screenplay is based on the 1998 Texas Monthly magazine article "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas" written by his co-adapter Skip Hollandsworth, keeps his movie tip-toeing between morbid humor and dry drollness as it goes back and forth between the main story and the interviews with the town people and other characters involved with the case and the following trial, and this documentary-like approach is the constant source of amusement and laughs.
I heard that it was difficult for Linklater to get his production financed because the screenplay looked plain and dull on the surface. It really could have been like that because the story itself does feel like another routine episode from one of those TV documentary programs about sensational real-life crime cases, but Linklater imbues his story with a delicious local flavor through the locations and his cast. I particularly enjoyed the interview scenes with the town people, which reminded me of that fascinating oddness observed from the Southern town residents in Errol Morris' short documentary "Vernon, Florida" (1981). Although they are actually the mix of the real town people and professional actors, they all look uniformly real as the people who have been living in the area for years, and the way they seriously talk about Bernie, Mrs. Nugent, their town, and other things is fun to listen and observe. I do not know whether Texas is really divided into several areas as told by one town folk, but it is certainly amusing even if it is not true.
Jack Black, who successfully collaborated with Linklater in "School of Rock" (2003) before, pushes his ingratiating persona to the new dimension here in this film. While he looks a lot different from the real-life counterpart of his character as shown before the end credits, he convincingly embodies a likable and courteous guy compulsively driven to be nice and generous to the others around him. He might hate Mrs. Nugent for a moment, but he still wants to treat her nicely even when it doesn't matter to her any more under his irreversible situation, and his 'nice' behavior ironically puts him in the circumstance far worse than it could have been.
