Hit & Run is actor/director Dax Shepard's debut feature film with co-writer/director David Palmer, following Shepard's success as Crosby Baverman in TV's Parenthood. Despite his turn on Punk'd with Ashton Kutcher and his time playing opposite the hilarious Will Arnett in Let's Go To Prison, the director's brand of bro-humor is wanting of something, but strangely refreshing at the same time. Shepard and Palmer manage to whip out a cliche homophobic slur about prisons and, in the next moment, poke fun at how little some straight guys know about gay men and how much more aware their girlfriends are.
Hit & Run was Shepard's opportunity to give it all he's got artistically and satisfy his need for speed—he races motorcycles. Shepard also stars as a reformed car thief named Charlie Bronson, who is under witness protection by federal agent Randy (Tom Arnold). Taking a big risk, Charlie makes a gut decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural California to drive girlfriend Annie (played by Shepard's real-life fiancee, Kristen Bell) to a job interview in Los Angeles. Annie then meets with the pot-smoking dean of social sciences, played by Sean Hayes (NBC's "Will & Grace").
Bell (known for the TV shows Gossip Girl and Veronica Mars as well as the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Shepard are titularly comic, but certainly not a duo bound to be a classic. Shepard's irreverence as Charlie is, at times, more distasteful than clever or ironic. Charlie's character seems to be purposefully discriminating against every culture, creed, race and sexuality for the sake of annoying his girlfriend, who is a level-headed social studies teacher with the patience of a saint.
Kristin Chenoweth steals her singular scene as a community administrator giving Annie her superfluous preliminary interview for the teaching position in L.A. The Wicked star and beloved reoccurring guest on Glee easily reprises the tragicomic role of the snappy yet errant blond addict without the singing and dancing. It's disappointing that her appearance is so brief.
Perhaps because Shepard is so close to his script, it feels as if he's laughing at himself. Few in the audience (with whom I shared the awkward pleasure of viewing this film) chuckled when Bradley Cooper, playing an angry white gangster, stuffs dog food in a Black man's mouth and holds him to the ground with a gun to his head. I'm not sure Shepard or Palmer understand when the joke is off.
Lesser-known actor Jess Rowland plays Gill, a bored gay state police officer. He amuses himself and his female partner by tracking down the few gay men in the California desert with a version of Grindr, a gay hook-up app for mobile phones. The romantic mismatching of Tom Arnold and the officer is ridiculous, but Shepard was clever to poke fun at how gays get together nowadays. Also featured is Beau Bridges as Shepard's distant father who shares his passion for horsepower. Hottie Ryan Hansen also plays Annie's stalker ex-boyfriend who chases the couple across the state in his convertible.
The many stylish slow-motion tailspins and car crashes are really just fluff, but the real heart of the film is the main couple's palpable chemistry. They share a memorable scene filled with pillow talk that would make most couples blush if they knew who was listening.
Bernie is a docudrama based on the Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth in 1998 about a real-life crime committed in the small East Texas town of Carthage by an assistant funeral home director named Bernie Tiede who just might have been gay.
The town sits on what was formerly one of the largest gas fields in the world. Jack Black portrays Bernie as a sympathetic model citizen who shot much older female admirer Margorie Nugent, played by Shirley MacLaine. Nugent is a sharp-toothed rich heiress, and her litigious family—as well as the whole town—despises her.
Margorie takes a special interest in Bernie once he becomes the talk of the town. Why would she befriend the town saint except to have him all to herself. Held captive by Margorie, Bernie loses his sanity in a very sudden moment told in docudrama fashion. The murder and the body are unseen. What we do see is the forensics team digging through the refrigerator where Margorie's butchered body has been preserved for months. No one noticed her absence except for Margorie's stockbroker.
Interviews with real Carthage residents who knew the real Bernie help to color the plot in ways a straight narrative approach to the material could not. The one-on-one interviews Sheriff Danny Buck (re-enacted by Matthew McConaughey) seem to be the only interviews that were fictionalized. The rest of the townspeople's gossipy charm goes without saying. Many of the residents interviewed feel the real tragedy was that Bernie had to serve time for doing what many of them would have liked to do themselves.
Bernie is available on DVD and Blu-ray Aug. 22 from major retailers.
Film notes:
—Michael Anthony, the director of For Billy—an anti-bullying documentary shot in Wheeling, Ill., and Chicago—will be signing copies of his companion book at Indian Trails Library, 355 S. Schoenbeck Rd., Wheeling, on Saturday, Aug. 25, at 1 p.m. Snippets of the film will be shown at the signing and there will be a live performance by the teens and parents of Wheeling High School, one of the locations where the film was shot. All net profits raised at the event will be donated to a battered women's and children center in downtown Chicago.
