I was supposed to write this nearly two months ago, after I had seen Richard Linklater's latest film, Hit Man on Netflix, but between work and more interesting things to do, like watch movies in theaters, I just couldn't find the time. Still I feel I need to write this, since it's been percolating in my mind for a while, and since Glen Powell is still very much topical, being in the blockbuster film Twisters out in theaters now (which I intend to watch).
In 2011, Richard Linklater, a well-regarded director and screenwriter responsible for memorable films like School of Rock, Boyhood and the "Before" trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight), made a curious, little-seen film known as Bernie, which starred Jack Black as the title character, Shirley MacLaine as Marjorie Nugent, the elderly widow whom Bernie befriended and later murdered in cold blood, Matthew McConaughey as a prosecutor determined to put Bernie behind bars, and a whole bunch of townspeople who actually lived through the events that started with Bernie's bizarre friendship with Mrs. Nugent and ended with her brutal murder at his hands and his eventual trial and incarceration. Not actors playing the townspeople, notably, the actual townspeople. It's actually an interesting hybrid of comedy, drama, and documentary, and Linklater unflinchingly depicts the very moment in which Bernie takes Mrs. Nugent's life with a rifle, after which he stuffs her in a freezer. As a piece of narrative, it actually works, but when one learns that it actually served as some kind of advocacy for Bernie Tiede's reduced sentence, suddenly the film takes on a wholly different complexion. However one feels about the characters in this film, it is not denied that Bernie Tiede murdered Marjorie Nugent, and yet, somehow, for a few years it began to look as if this film might result in Bernie's case being retried with him receiving a lighter sentence, all because of Jack Black's highly sympathetic portrayal of the character. That particular crusade ended in 2016 when Bernie was re-sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Linklater would go on to make other films, so one would think that was over, right? I know I did.
Then, bizarrely, in this year's Hit Man, Linklater has his lead characters commit murder in cold blood and then go off happily into the sunset. This ending comes, bizarrely enough, after Linklater spends a portion of the film discussing the ethics of putting people in jail for wanting to kill someone so badly they're willing to offer money to someone else to do it. This would have simply been off-putting were it not for the existence of Bernie; it would have felt like such a sour endnote to what was an otherwise entertaining and very competently-made film. Like Bernie, it should be noted Hit Man was inspired by true events, specifically the very interesting story of a college professor named Gary Johnson, who actually moonlighted as a fake hit man for the local police in order to entrap people who wanted to have other people killed. Unlike Bernie Tiede, however, Gary Johnson never actually killed anybody, and yet Linklater took the bizarre liberty of not only having him kill someone but having him outright murder that person. I don't understand why anyone would want to tell a story like that; I know if I were one of Johnson's heirs, I wouldn't be happy about it.
Is it possible that Linklater was chafing at how his film had failed to have the impact he had hoped it would on Bernie Tiede's trial, and so, years later, made this film in which someone gets away with murder as some form of catharsis? It is, of course, impossible to say, but I honestly cannot help but wonder if there is some kind of spiritual connection between these two movies.
