Mockudrama mania.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Documentary-style movies

ONE OF THIS YEAR'S BEST under-the-radar films is Richard Linklater's light dark comedy-biography "Bernie" (with Jack Black in the title role). The movie chronicles the unlikely 1990s true story of a Carthage, Texas, assistant mortician whose endearing genial nature soon is juxtaposed with a wealthy old battle-ax of a companion (Shirley MacLaine). Given the nature of black humor, a murder ultimately does occur. The brilliance of the picture, beyond Black's inspired underplaying of his possibly gay character, is a Linklater coauthored script that incorporates a host of interviews with many actual Carthage citizens often spouting their own darkly comic thoughts. This gossipy Greek chorus entertainingly moves the story along with appropriately realistic sound bites. For instance, when one citizen suggests the religions Black character is "light in the loafers" because he always wears sandals, one of many elderly lady champions of Bernie bristles, "Our Lord always wore sandals and never got married and had 12 male disciples--and nobody ever called them queer."

Flirting with docudrama, or is that mockudrama-parody, there is nothing inherently new about this film's use of the interviews--though Linklater merits special kudos for effectively using so many nonperformers. To better examine cinema's incorporation of "interviews" into a narrative, four other diverse examples merit abbreviated dissection:

Along ore self-consciously docudrama lines, Shari Berman's biography of comic book writer Harvey Pekar, "American Splendor" (2003), is a wonderful blend of real footage of curmudgeon Pekar and his perfectly cast movie alter ego Pad Giamatti. For instance, here is Pekar's introduction of his "going nowhere" on-screen character: "Although he's a pretty scholarly cat, he never got much of formal education. For the most part, he's lived in [crappy] neighborhoods, held [crappy] jobs, and now he's knee-deep into a disastrous second marriage. So, if you're the kind of person looking for romance or escapism or some fantasy figure to save the day--guess what?--you've got the wrong movie."

In what is arguably cinema's most famous use of movie interviews, is Rob Reiner's "When Harry Met Sally ..." (1989, with a script by Nora Ephron). Peppered throughout this romantic comedy are brief love seat interviews with older couples rehashing their kismet moments. What is not widely known is that many of these interlude segments were based upon true stories culled from...