Myths of the Near-Past

“Bernie” is a shaggy, idiosyncratic work, possibly the strangest yet in a career full of strangeness. Set in the small town of Carthage, Texas, it tells of an effeminate, musical-loving mortician named Bernie Tiede (Black) who befriends and then commits a horrible crime against a repressed wealthy matriarch (MacLaine), leaving him to face the wrath of a local prosecutor (McConaughey). The movie is a dramatization of an actual case — the script was based on a 1998 Texas Monthly article about Tiede, and Linklater, who attended Tiede’s trial, spent years researching it.