Partly Truth and Partly Fiction
Review by Ken Burke Bernie
A disturbingly funny tale of almost-justifiable murder,
softened by folksy forgiveness with a cast based on real-life "characters" from
the piney woods of East Texas, y’all.
The Dictator
Sasha Baron Cohen ups the ante on political incorrectness regarding anti-American attitudes from a cruel but clueless Arab meanie; hilarious if you’re not grossly offended.
Sasha Baron Cohen ups the ante on political incorrectness regarding anti-American attitudes from a cruel but clueless Arab meanie; hilarious if you’re not grossly offended.
Now,
y’all lissen up! I’m fixin’ to
tell ya ‘bout this new movie ‘bout that undertaker boy from Carthage … ya know,
tha one that got in trouble awhil’ back fer killin’ that ol’ bitch that had
more money’n God ‘n then stuck her in tha freezer? Yeah, you ‘member him?
Well, now there’s this movie all ‘bout it that’ll keep ya busy ‘til them
Tuna, Texas boys git ‘nother one of
their stories tagether that we’n go on over ta Fo't Worth ta see.
If
I hadn’t been born in Texas and spent a bit over half my life there before
moving to California (Reminds of a joke from those days: “Hey, old man. You lived here all your life?” “Not yet.”) I might not be inclined to
believe that Richard Linklater’s newest film Bernie could be based on the true story of a gay undertaker—excuse
me, Assistant Funeral Director—who becomes the constant caretaker and traveling
companion of a wealthy, despicable widow, then kills her and has the whole town
rooting for his innocence when he goes to trial. However, having been there (Texas) and done that (don’t ask), along with recognizing that Linklater is a Houston native who knows of what he speaks (with
very insightful central Texas movies Slacker
[1991] and Dazed and Confused [1993,
also with Matthew McConaughey] that first brought him to public attention
before he diversified into completely different tales such as Before Sunrise [1995], SubUrbia [1996], Waking Life [2001], The
School of Rock [2003, also with Jack Black], Before Sunset [2004], and A
Scanner Darkly [2006]—although I still content that I should have had his
career because I was in Austin from 1966-72, then again 1974-1977 and
frequently noted the idea used in Slacker
about a film that just randomly follows a succession of characters around
without a central plot, so he obviously pulled it from the ozone still wafting
through town without even so much as an acknowledgement to me in the credits
[just as I never got credit nor royalties for inventing the international
best-seller, the Cherry 7-Up, at the Surf Drive-In in Galveston in 1966, much
to the waitress’ surprise and disgust]; of course beyond that original Slacker idea I would have to had
Linklater’s immense talent to actually have generated such a career, but let’s
not quibble over small details), I can really appreciate how he’s captured
small-town Texas life, so familiar to me from decades of visiting my
grandmother and then my retired parents in Clyde, a roughly 2,000-population
berg 15 miles east of Abilene (OK, Abilene’s 180 miles west of Dallas; are we
oriented yet?). The specifics of prairie-town Clyde may be a bit different than in more piney-woods Carthage, but many of the
folks that Linklater has incorporated into his fictional biography of Bernie
Tiede are the real thing, obviously speaking about the actual Bernie not Jack
Black’s scripted version of the endearing but totally guilty homocidalist who
seemed to be generating business for his funeral parlor.
Black
is to be praised, as always, for giving us a character that’s hard to dislike,
even if we don’t agree with his decisions or their motivations, just as Shirley
MacLaine perfectly portrays Marjorie Nugent as a sour apple appropriate to be
plucked and put in cold storage (with her personality indicated by leather-skin
arms that finally soften a bit after Bernie starts coaxing her off to massages
and away-from-Texas vacations so that she’s not always surrounded in her huge
house with the stuffed bodies of the animals once shot by her husband, now as
dead as they are; but she remains at heart the woman who can “rip you a
3-bedroom, 2-bath, double-wide new asshole” when crossed) and Matthew McConaughey
(who grew up in Longview, a hub—of sorts—of east Texas, very close to Bernie’s
neighborhood) is convincing as District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson,
determined to enforce the law regarding murder (and body-stashing) despite
Bernie’s vast popularity in close-knit Carthage. What makes the film so appealing to me is how well Linklater
has constructed the flow, alternating between the ongoing story of Bernie’s
increasing relationship bondage with Marjorie (not the 50 Shades of Grey type, just his subservience to her constant
demands on him as a sort of social secretary) and the scripted or otherwise testimony
from actual locals and plausible actors on these two primary characters—although
for those not from Texas or other parts of the South these depictions will just
reinforce the usual negative stereotypes of what Carol Burnett and Vicki
Lawrence used to parody in their “Mama’s Family” skits, but having known people
in Clyde (who shall remain nameless, lest I get sued as Linklater did for using
names of former friends in Dazed and
Confused) who were just like “Mama” or some of the Carthage chorus I have
to admit that stereotypes are grounded in some truth, even if it gets viciously
exaggerated in fictional applications.
Judging from the raucous, but not mean-spirited, laughter in the Pleasant Hill, CA theatre where
I saw Bernie with an audience I’d
judge to be in my age bracket (where the first thought of “Elvis” isn’t about
Costello, and even the first thought of Costello is for Lou, not English Elvis,
and “Who’s on first?” [If you’re still drawing a blank, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfmvkO5x6Ng,
although if you don’t care for either baseball or absurdist comedy it probably
won’t matter much]), I think there are plenty of people who can appreciate the
frustrated belittlement behind Bernie’s misguided choice of an exit strategy
with Marjorie, understand why such a unique public figure was so well loved in
his own community (although his sexual orientation probably wouldn’t have
gotten him many votes if he’d been running for mayor, he was an active and
respected neighbor with his church and little theatre activities), and at least
see the common humanity in the Carthage opinion-sharers even if they don’t express
themselves in a manner all that familiar to us high-falutin’ city folks.
I
can understand how those of you who’ve never met someone like Bernie Tiede
(photo on your right) or others of the good people of deep east Texas (a bit of a separate country of its own, within a state that prides itself on having once
been an independent country before joining the U.S., as explained early on in
the film for outsiders who can’t appreciate the intra-state tensions that arise
among the 5 primary regions [excluding the Lubbock-Amarillo panhandle area
which is sort of a lost cause, even for other Texans, despite giving us Buddy
Holly and Waylon Jennings], and I admit I’m more familiar with the west,
central, and southeast areas myself, having mostly just driven through the east
and south zones on my way to other destinations) may find Bernie to be as exaggerated as The
Dictator’s depiction of a crazy tyrant from North Africa, but if you think
that I’d recommend that you take a look at an information source such as http://www.kltv.com/story/18524948/bernie-tiede-opens-up-about-his-jailhouse-visits-with-jack-black
(unfortunately with a rather jerky video download, at least on my computer) to
get a sense of the real Bernie Tiede who sees the unity of comedy and tragedy
in every aspect of life, even if some residents of Carthage, including D.A.
Davidson, don’t see anything funny about the killing of Nugent. Murder isn’t a joke, but sometimes life
is so strange and tragic that we need to see and accept the craziness that
weaves through it for all of us in order to keep what sanity that we can. Bernie
helped me accomplish that; I recommend that you seriously consider seeing it because I
think it’s well worth the encounter even if you ultimately find yourself
agreeing with Danny Buck about its impropriety.
Impropriety
may drive you out of the theatre, though, if you attempt The Dictator, as this latest assault on political correctness from
Sacha Baron Cohen, directed by Larry Charles, is so intentionally offensive
that unless you can see it for the satire it’s intended to be, not only on
megalomaniacal despots but also on the evolving concepts of freedom and tyranny
in our increasingly complicated world, then you’re bound to be put off by it,
whether you’re Arabic (Cohen’s Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen says he isn’t, nor
is Islam made a target of ridicule, but the Maummar Khadafy-Saddam Hussein-Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad implications are so clearly constructed as to leave no doubt about
the inspirations for his character and the xenophobic disgust we’re supposed to
feel toward him), patriotic American (our politics, including kneejerk racism,
come in for as much of a critique as does the ideology of totalitarian Middle
Eastern nations), eco-feminist (if the produce sold in Zoey’s [Anna Faris] Free
Earth Collective got any more environmentally friendly you’d have to come there
and grow it yourself, then eat it on the spot so that you wouldn’t leave any
carbon [-based life form] footprints travelling to and from the store), or even
just a member of a Harlem drug gang (for this reference you just have to see The Dictator, which goes beyond even the
seemingly-unbelievable levels of plot contrivance in Bernie). You should
know going in that any film that begins with a dedication to departed North
Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and features a protagonist such as the one in the above-left photo isn’t intended to be taken seriously, even when dealing with
a subject as serious as U.S. paranoia about radical Islamic terrorists and
harsh rulers of countries with cultures that are largely incomprehensible to us. Further, after the savage attacks on
narrative and cultural propriety in Cohen’s previous Borat (Charles, 2006—I’ll spare you the full title) and Brüno (Charles, 2009) you would be
further ill-advised to expect anything remotely balanced or tactful here. With all of those warnings in place,
all I can say about The Dictator is
that I find it hilarious in its intentionally distasteful attacks on the
stereotypes perpetuated in our popular media on virtually everyone from Morocco
to India (while admitting, as with Bernie,
that stereotypes do evolve from aspects of truth, including the truths of
despotic madmen past and present running many of the countries in the
geographic swath noted above and crazed terrorists who probably would like to
destroy the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty rather than joke
about such—although based on past depictions we might well see those landmarks
threatened by fictional villains of another variety as variations on Spider-Man
and Avengers stories continue to target oft-abused Manhattan in future fantasy
extravaganzas of these high-profile franchises).
Suffice
it to say that with The Dictator we
are quickly given a bogus sociopolitical history lesson on the fictional country
of the Republic of Wadiya (far too close to Libya to be understood as anything
else) and why the current occupant of their flamboyant palace is so
self-absorbed and evil as to need “Atrocious” added to his other titles (even
to the point of playing a big-screen video game where he kills Israeli athletes
at the 1972 Olympics). Yet, also
in the brief but effective opening scenes we learn that he’s a very lonely man
(his mother “died” in childbirth as the result of some unintended offense, but
not the worst crime of motherhood, that of bearing a daughter for his
equally-evil father) who fills his cuddling needs with an endless string of
prostitutes memorialized in a huge photo “album” on his wall, a collection that
includes among others Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just as quickly as in the opening scenes,
things change for Aladeen as he visits NYC to speak to the U.N. but is replaced
with a simple-minded goat-herder double by the conspiratorial second-in-command
Tamir (Ben Kingsley), who has his own plot of getting the double to sign a new
constitution that would allow Wadiya’s vast oil reserves to be exploited by the
usual gang of global corporations and the Chinese. After escaping an assassination attempt, Aladeen is taken in
(under misunderstood premises) by Zoey, reclaims his authority, and seemingly
has been transformed by Zoey’s example (and her teaching him how to masturbate,
with results that are illustrated by images of soaring eagles, splashing
dolphins, a basketball dunk, and a clip from Forrest Gump [Robert Zemeckis, 1994] where the tormented kid
literally runs out of his leg brace) to declare that real change will come to
his country. However, in the
equally-quick closing scenes (the film has a great energetic pace, finishing
its goofiness in a mere 83 minutes) we must question his “conversion” as we see
tanks forcing Aladeen’s subjects to move to the voting line for
“democratically” electing him as President (I guess Russia’s seemingly eternal
ruler, Vladimir Putin, gave him advice on that one) and when his now-wife Zoey
tells him she’s expecting he ends the story with the pertinent question of “Are
you having a boy or an abortion?” As
noted above, none of this will go over easily if you take any of it at face
value (a constant danger with the fierce humor of satire, which completely loses
its intention and impact if understood literally, as it invariably is by
certain audience members), but if you can appreciate the mockery that Cohen is
making of the blind acceptance of the things he’s criticizing throughout the
film—including his scathing condemnation of hypocritical American “democracy”
where Aladeen says we don’t have the luxury of living under a dictatorship
where we could be ruled by a self-serving government and manipulated by the
powerful 1% who really run our society—I think you’ll find The Dictator to be an hilariously useful antidote to the
cringe-worthy political ads, political maneuverings, and sociopolitical
corruption that has invaded our country more successfully than Osama bin
Laden’s terrorists ever hoped to accomplish.
Of
course, in declaring my own ideological perspective with such a charged
statement I realize that I’m chasing away any potential audience for The Dictator that doesn’t want to be
offended by such “humor” and I confirm my self-resolution to not try to arrange
a double feature of Bernie and The Dictator at a Carthage, TX movie
theatre, but for those Northern California-type “granolas” like me (you know,
fruits and nuts), no matter where you live, I think this film is about as
constantly laugh-out-loud funny as you can get. (About the only thing Cohen didn’t include was an updated
Abbott and Costello routine of an al-Qaeda strategy meeting that opens with
“Who’s bombed first?” … OK, with that I’d better say “Goodnight, Gracie”—and if
that reference doesn’t make any more sense than “Who’s on first?” then I
suggest a little research on another great vaudeville team, Burns and Allen, at a site such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_and_Allen
or other sources including YouTube where you can find many clips and episodes
of their TV series. But knowing
what you now do about my tastes in humor, maybe you’d be better off with reruns
of The Big Bang Theory; as with the
option of interplanetary peace or immanent destruction at the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still [Robert
Wise, 1951], the choice is yours—how’s that for real democracy?)
If
you’re interested in learning more about Bernie
here are some suggested links:
http://www.youtube.com/topic/9Df6i0SHeK4/bernie
(a cluster of trailer and clips; or, if you’re interested just put “Bernie”
into YouTube search and you can also get Bernie Mac, Weekend at Bernie’s clip, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Bernie
Madoff, all on just the first page)
If
you’re interested in learning more about The
Dictator here are some suggested links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/republicofwadiya?feature=results_main
(this is YouTube’s “official site” for the “Republic of Wadiya” with movie
trailer, clips, etc.)
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