Separated by a common state
Matthew McConaughey
goes to my church and the other day, he was sitting a couple of rows behind me.
I’m pretty sure he looked at me several times during the service. Of course,
his wife and kids were with him, but still I felt we were getting close.
It’s that seven
degrees of separation thing. Now that Matthew and I are friends (at least
there’s friendship on my part), I’m two degrees away from the movie, “Bernie.”
My friend who lives in the Four Seasons in downtown Austin is a neighbor to one
of the actors who played a Carthage resident, the guy who was so, so funny. She
is also two degrees away from the movie. But I digress.
The Carthage folks
in “Bernie,” whether they were real or actors, were actually only one degree of
separation from most of us in Texas. We don’t just know people like that. We
are related to them. Richard Linklater got them just right. He hit on that
balance between their philosophical bigotry and their actual demeanor, which is
quite often not bigoted at all. They
were so spot on — the way they looked, the way they talked, the storytelling.
Who can explain
why an entire town stood behind a man they were almost sure killed one of their
most upstanding citizens? I can. For whatever reason — probably a reason of the
heart — they perceived Bernie Tiede to be one of them. They probably knew he
was gay. They probably knew he was up to no good, hanging around the rich widow
with his eyes on her money. And eventually they probably knew he killed her and
stuffed her body in a deep freeze in her kitchen. But they loved him all the
same.
It’s eccentric,
just as Texas is eccentric. You can’t pigeonhole it. It sometimes defies
description, much less definition. Most southerners are like that, too, as are
most southern movies and novels. It makes northerners nervous, liking their
stereotypes all neat and tidy like they do. But for most of us in the south, it’s
just, well … home.
“Bernie” is based
on Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly
article, “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” which is a great read. You can
find it here http://www.texasmonthly.com/1998-01-01/feature4.php
So I passed up the opportunity to see Matthew in “Magic Mike” because as far as I know, he doesn’t play one of the male strippers. Although, I may need to rethink that decision.
So I passed up the opportunity to see Matthew in “Magic Mike” because as far as I know, he doesn’t play one of the male strippers. Although, I may need to rethink that decision.
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