Critics reviews

My favorite Richard Linklater feature, Bernie (2011), is many different things at once, some of which are in potential conflict with one another. How we ultimately judge it depends on either reconciling or suspending our separate verdicts on how we judge it as fiction (and art) and/or how we judge it as fact (and justice).

The play between fiction and non-fiction that constitutes the film's narrative dynamic is precisely that: play, not an ‘undermining' or ‘interrogation' of the ‘codes' of fictional/non-fictional filmmaking. Just as Linklater's double-decade-spanning Before…triptych is as much a documentary about its actors as a continuing story about its characters, Bernie intuitively understands the intrinsic permeability between fiction and fact...

Bernie Tiede is a real person and this film – however unlikely it may occasionally feel – always feels like a truthful, sensitive and eerily objective representation of events. It's also very, very funny.

The whole of Bernie is constructed in such a way so that each character and action is seen from at least one sympathetic point of view, encouraging the viewer to find sympathy but also, more importantly, challenging him or her to avoid easy judgements.

The key to the Linklater's success with Bernie isn't only his empathy for each and every character involved in this story, but his willingness to present each one honestly, flaws and all, turning what should in any objectionable sense be a cut-and-dry case of murder in the first into something approaching grand tragedy.

The blend of documentary and fictionalization soon proves uneven and unhealthy. The interspersed interviews cause the plot to drag terminally, and, worse, they accentuate the garish actorliness of the A-listers.

Truly it's as though Bernie were not quite finished, or Linklater believed that the true-crime angle of the Tiede story would provide ample plot motility and compositional shape. What we have instead is a kind of matzo ball soup, with memorable words, images, and expressions, floating in a thin, clear broth. I can't help but feel confident that Linklater knows better, so I wonder. Was this a botched attempt at a filmmaking as "plain-spoken" and doggedly unfancy as the people of Carthage?

Not really sure what attracted Linklater to this particular real-life story, which isn't nearly as outrageous—or even as interesting—as the movie and its ad campaign insist. Given that inherent limitation, though, he has an enormously good time with it, again making terrific use of Jack Black's natural showmanship (a smash cut to "Seventy-Six Trombones" brings down the house) and tapping the playfully sleazy side of Matthew McConaughey.

The troubling question at the heart of this liberating, sunlit, deceptively simple but extremely complex and fairly formidable film is: should the law or the community itself decide the fate of its citizens? Linklater leaves it for us to ponder.