Trailer
Plot summary
Bernhardt "Bernie" Tiede works as an assistant funeral director at the Leggett Funeral Home in Carthage, Texas, where his charity and his habit of attending to elderly widows make him a favorite in town. Marjorie Nugent, a rich widow whose relatives find her difficult and who has few friends, meets Bernie when he handles her husband's funeral, and she warms to him. The two become inseparable, sharing meals and traveling together. She makes him her companion and puts him in charge of her money, and he leaves his job at the funeral home to work for her full time. Her requests for his attention keep growing, and her temper turns on everyone around her.
Cast
- Mathew Greeras Carl
- Marjorie Domeas Townsperson
- Tim Carikeras Townsperson
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bernie (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is based on Skip Hollandsworth's January 1998 Texas Monthly article "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas", which covered the 1996 murder of 81-year-old millionaire Marjorie Nugent in Carthage, Texas, by her 39-year-old companion, Bernhardt "Bernie" Tiede.
- After seeing the film, Austin attorney Jodi Cole met director Richard Linklater about the case, then visited Tiede in prison and began a habeas corpus petition raising issues his direct appeal had never addressed. Tiede was released from his life sentence in May 2014 on $10,000 bail, on condition that he live with Linklater in Austin.
- Panola County District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson, played in the film by McConaughey, attacked it publicly, saying you cannot make a dark comedy out of a murder. He called the film historically inaccurate and complained that Nugent's side of the story is missing from it.
- Linklater said the screenplay he co-wrote with Skip Hollandsworth was a boring read, and that the gossip element almost kept the film from being made. He pushed on because he could already imagine the accents and knew they would be funny characters.
- Nugent's nephew Joe Rhodes wrote in The New York Times Magazine, shortly before the film's general release, that apart from a few insignificant details it tells the story pretty much the way it happened. A lawyer for her only child then sent Rhodes a letter strongly suggesting the possibility of legal action over those remarks.
- Prosecutor Danny Buck Davidson eventually agreed that Tiede had been wrongly sentenced for first-degree murder and deserved a lesser sentence. Even so, at an April 2016 resentencing hearing in Henderson, Texas, a jury deliberated for four and a half hours and gave him 99 years to life.
