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.
As the movie progresses, Bernie becomes even more himself, and Larry and Rich get into their new roles puppeteering the body of their slain boss around town. (It must be mentioned that the two learn from Bernie’s answering machine, which mistakenly catches Bernie on tape, that they had been the intended murder targets.) This is just the self-justifying lubricant the two dudes need to see this thing—their deserved vacation at a real beach sans wastewater—to its completion. The bits like this continue throughout. Rich fumbles over his preposterous fables about Bernie, at one point telling his love interest (a summer intern at the office) that Bernie is too busy to talk. Larry day-drinks and plays Monopoly with Bernie’s body, whom he supplies with a lit cigarette in one hand and whose other hand he manipulates with an umbrella cord, so that Bernie’s corpse can wave to the friendly girls in bikinis passing by on the beach, and so that the two lovable schmucks can finally relax and maybe even get laid.
Stay in it for the party, when an “authoress” (as she’s identified in the credits) says to a mate, “Harvey, you promised me a review on the front page of the Sunday Times books section,” but is told that the subject matter—some piece suggesting that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were secretly married—was of no interest to readers. Stay watching for the books on Bernie’s desk in his home office: Crimes and Criminals, Elmore Leonard’s Glitz (dubbed “a cat-and-mouse tale with claws”), What’s Next (not the Drake song). If explicit irony isn’t what does it, stay for the boat scene. That was the part in the movie that my mom and I laughed at the hardest: Bernie’s body gets tied to a seat on his boat, but when Larry swerves to avoid another boat, his body is thrust overboard. Bernie is then dragged behind the boat, hitting all the channel markers, ringing their bells one by one. Stay to see the delighted buffoons vacuum Bernie’s toupee, and then staple it in place to his bald head. Laugh heartily when his limp body falls from a wheeled reclining chair, off the deck, and onto a sandy beach, only to be buried by a spicy toddler with his plastic shovel and bucket. Besides, as People magazine pointed out, the actor who played Bernie Lomax was not actually dead. So there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re forgiven.
People say a lot of stuff, like “Money isn’t everything,” and “Laughter is the best medicine.” Bernie Lomax may have been sick-rich, with an enviable roving set of chicks, race cars, and a formidable tan, but he does not end up with the potential of a future—as his employees do—by the movie’s end. (Rich finds true love, for one.) Bernie may have had it all, but then look where it got him. I enjoyed where it got me and my mother. My mom had to close the Video Vault in the early aughts. Even our two-for-one weekend deals and my adding weekends to my schedule couldn’t salvage the declining number of customers and the introduction of DVDs. People had moved on. Sherry and my mother sold the place and all its contents and barely broke even. Nothing in the store was worth anything, the market dictated. We would never party like the Bernies of America, those decamillionaires who grew in number rapidly in the ’80s, those men that could continue celebrating and haunting others even when dead, but we gave ourselves heartburn laughing at their foibles from the comforts of our mediocre living rooms. When I emailed my mom asking how she’d felt then about selling the Video Vault, she wrote: “Sure was fun, though, having it, and the customers loved us. You were our most reliable and best employee.”
But the end of the Video Vault would never take away our love of cinema—of its crass or intellectual nature. We lived in America, which was to say, my mother promoted an ethos of embracing the absurd and finding the gems, however small and hidden. When we vacated the building, we left the unframed posters on the walls and the membership punch cards in their little bowl near the cash register. We left the display racks, like a maze woven throughout the store. The heavily fingered recent blockbuster movie releases with their solicitous stickers were there at the entrance, right next to smaller-budget, pristine, deeply adored films from a previous decade, like Chungking Express. We unplugged the Video Vault sign and took ourselves home for good.
