As an actor, Bruce Dern hassling turned perceived weaknesses into strengths, which makes the lack of professional polish on “Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern” that adorns most screen biographies part of its considerable charm. Director Mike Mendez doesn’t try to make the interviews with Dern filmed over four years remotely uniform or create consistency for the animated sequences deployed to illustrate his life at times, involving both excellent stop-motion with puppets by Norman Cabrera and 2D drawings from Mendez, respectively, and if his main subject is on a tear, being the great raconteur he is, the film won’t insist on holding onto its chronological structure. Mendez might seem to be an unusual choice to make a documentary at all, let alone anything as standard as a biography when he is better known for outrageous horror and exploitation films, yet the filmmaker is ideally suited to make a film about Dern when both just want to be involved in a good story.
Other versions of “Dernsie” could easily be made when Dern spends little time discussing his personal life throughout the five decades he’s lived in Hollywood, seeming to speak more at length about his second wife Diane Ladd’s performance in “Wild at Heart” years after their divorce than their time together, but “Dernsie” nonetheless gives a great sense of who he is through talk about the work where his passion and the irreverence that made him an unconventional star comes through undiluted. Separate from the specific, Dern’s career can be seen as a great portrait of fashioning a steady career as a working actor, though unlikely to be replicated when he found himself at the right time and place both as Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg were starting the Actors Studio in New York and his deference to becoming a silent scene partner for the likes of Paul Newman and James Dean afforded him a spot in the company versus those who might like some lines and wouldn’t turn up his nose at playing the bad guy as others would, making him a staple of TV shows that would bring him back multiple times in different roles.
“I think playing a good person wasn’t his strength,” says Walter Hill, one of a number of interviewees in the film who clearly cherished working with him many times says, and one of the intriguing through lines of the film is how different he was from the characters he’s played when daughter Laura describes him as a teetotaler who ordered Shirley Temples at the Polo Lounge despite the many out-of-control villains he dined out on. Many going into “Dernsie” will be well aware how much damage was done to his career by being the lone person to kill John Wayne in a movie (“The Cowboys”), but far more interesting is the lesser-known fact that it was released at the same time when Dern had hope to forge a different direction for himself as a leading man in “Silent Running” and would subsequently instruct Laura not to be pigeonholed while he continued to take any part that would come his way out of fear it could all go away at any minute. A case is made that he brings at least a little of himself to all his projects when the film takes its title from the nickname for his unique ability to improvise a take and add something a bit extra to a scene, and a section on his role in “The Great Gatsby” allows him to reflect on a remarkable family tree when he grew up similarly in a wealthy WASP family with ties to Adlai Stevenson and Frank Lloyd Wright that he came to reject and could tie his own experience to playing the skeptical Tom Buchanan.
At certain points, it seems like “Dernsie” could’ve benefitted from the all-archival Asif Kapadia treatment when there really does seem to be a movie clip of Dern from such an extensive career to visually compliment whatever he’s discussing and he’ll often fill all the speaking parts of any given story himself, doing entertaining impressions of Alfred Hitchcock or Bette Davis. But while any cutaways to static talking heads can come across as a mild speed bump, those talking heads certainly keep things lively when it’s Billy Bob Thornton, Walton Goggins and Quentin Tarantino and Mendez has the good sense to let them cook. The result is a little reckless structurally, but nothing less should be expected when it comes to Dern and the film does find its footing around the actor’s longtime love of running, which he only recently started to slow down after being known to start every day with a half-marathon. Although Dern had to give up running as a professional pursuit after becoming nationally renowned for it in high school, he suggests it planted in his mind a notion of endurance that became a bedrock for his acting career and while he recognizes that he’s approaching the finish line on the eve of turning 90, the film best reflects its subject when you want both to just keep going.
“Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern” does not yet have U.S. distribution.