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A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art.
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Weekend at Bernie’s is about being wealthy in America: babes, boats, fraud. According to my mother, Weekend at Bernie’s qualifies as a movie, not a film. In 1989, when the movie hit theaters, it flopped. The critic Roger Ebert said the twist wasn’t funny enough to carry the story forward. He hated it. But what he didn’t see, may he RIP, was that the one-note, unapologetically crass materialism was worth the rental price of seeing it through to the end.
It was my mom who taught me as a kid to distinguish between a movie and a film: Movies were notoriously more “fun,” which was like saying, in other words, “sort of stupid,” and notably American. Films were about the mind, which was to say they were art, and they were notably of the high-art type and notably foreign. While she was a student at the University of Iowa, she ran an independent movie theater called the Bijou in Iowa City—a theater where the writer T. C. Boyle took his then girlfriend, now wife of decades, Karen Boyle, on dates to see Kurosawa and Bergman films. In the years since, T. C. and Karen have said they learned everything they know about cinema during those years when my mother was the programmer.
In the mid-’90s, my mom and her partner, Sherry, took over the neighborhood video store in our mini neighborhood shopping center on the west side of Santa Barbara, near Foodland, a Laundromat, and a dollar store. They renamed it the Video Vault and put up a fresh new sign. They added foreign and independent rentals to the mix and kept the porn section in a designated corner. Dusty-rose curtains hung from the ceiling to demarcate that space. When I first asked my mother about Weekend at Bernie’s, she wrote to me that she didn’t remember it. I quickly received a follow-up email: “I just remember laughing at it even though the premise was kind of sick.” She was referring to Bernie, a corpse that was being toted around the beach.
In the movie, Larry/“Larr” (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard/“Rich” (Jonathan Silverman) are both low-level employees at an insurance company in New York City. Over the course of an unusually hot summer, the two likable imbeciles—who’ve been tasked with auditing the company’s financials—have been working weekends. Meanwhile, they find what passes as a kind of simulated joy on the rooftop of their corporate office—“This sucks, I’m so unhappy,” Larr says. The two substitute their dream of hitting the “real beach” (though Rich notes there are “no more real beaches” and suggests they go to Jones Beach and float around in hospital waste) with a boom box and an inflatable pool: “Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle as the Big Apple becomes the Baked Apple,” the radio announcer laments. Their luck shifts when they discover in their audit that there’s been life insurance fraud at the company: “Hold the phone, buddy—I got it!” Rich tells Larr. Come Monday morning, they report the error to their boss, and he invites them to his beach mansion in the Hamptons for Labor Day weekend. Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser) is a CEO’s CEO: gold watches, a potpourri of ladies, sprawling properties, healthy cocaine and company-embezzlement habits. Later that same day, after Larr and Rich pointed out the discrepancy, over a red-and-white-checkered-tablecloth dinner, Bernie asks his murdering thugs to take out Rich and Larry, but the thugs instead determine that it’s Lomax who needs to go.
At the end of the week, Rich and Larry arrive at Bernie’s house in the Hamptons, but when they get to the front door, he doesn’t show himself to let them in. As legitimate, invited guests, they let themselves into his modernist, rectilinear beach palace. The interior has been dressed in an array of pastel colors, the art and the furniture, like a roll of Smarties. “All of this could be yours if you set your goals and work hard,” Rich says to Larry of the sprawl. “My old man worked hard. All they did was give him more work,” Larry says about capitalism. The two guys pop champagne and discover that Bernie is dead. But before they can call the cops to report it, people start arriving for Bernie’s annual Labor Day weekend party. Nobody notices that Bernie is catatonic on the couch. Bernie is flawlessly lifeless, but he still manages to please his angry girlfriend; pinch a woman’s tush; fulfill his promise to give a baggie of cocaine to another woman; and, with his tennis coach, finagle, barter, and eventually settle on a good selling price for his Porsche; and mostly please his trainer (the trainer notes that Bernie needs to pump more iron but admires his relaxed physique as he rubs his arms). Larr and Rich take note of the fact that nobody seems to notice Bernie is dead. Bernie appears to be himself, fully. How far can Larr and Rich take this? Maybe the doofuses will enjoy a holiday after all.
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