Synopsis
In small-town Texas, affable and popular mortician Bernie Tiede strikes up a friendship with Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow well known for her sour attitude. When she becomes controlling and abusive, Bernie goes to great lengths to remove himself from her grasp.
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Cast
- Jack BlackBernie Tiede
- Shirley MacLaineMarjorie Nugent
- Matthew McConaugheyDanny Buck Davidson
- Brady ColemanScrappy Holmes
- Richard RobichauxLloyd Hornbuckle
- Rick DialDon Leggett
- Brandon SmithSheriff Huckabee
- Larry Jack DotsonRev. Woodard
- Merrilee McCommasMolly
- Mathew GreerCarl
- 100
Time Out
Matthew McConaughey finally locates his perfect métier as the town's Fordian skeptic, a district attorney who smells a rat. - 88
Observer
It's a delectable slice of Southern Gothic humor, a side show of rednecks and Bubbas and Aunt Tooties. - 83
The A.V. Club
Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances. - 80
Village Voice
Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. - 70
Variety
Pitch-perfect performances by Shirley MacLaine and an unusually restrained Jack Black hold together this offbeat true-crime saga, but Linklater's keen eye for human eccentricity flowers most memorably on the periphery. - 70
The New Yorker
It's an odd movie - mild in tone and circumspect, yet darkly funny, and done in a hybrid form that I don't think has been used so thoroughly before. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
More than the film that surrounds him, Jack Black is worth the price of admission in Bernie, an oddball May-December true life crime story that would have profited from being a whole lot darker and full-bodied than it is. - 58
Entertainment Weekly
All those twangy, homespun observations interrupt and annotate the narrative until Black and MacLaine's scenes start to feel as trivial as reenactments on a true-crime TV show.