BULLY A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2001 David N. Butterworth
*1/2 (out of ****)
Kids today, eh?
If you're into watching near on two hours of bored, foul-mouthed Florida teens having sex, doing drugs, having sex, listening to Eminem, having sex, playing video games, having sex, and killing one of their peers, then "Bully"'s for you.
Based on Jim Schutze's novelization of a true-life event, "Bully" charts the story of a handful of disenchanted teenagers who, in 1993, murdered their high school bully in cold, calculated blood. The film could have provided fascinating insights into what turned these aimless kids into premeditated killers. In the hands of controversial director Larry Clark ("Kids"), however, it has less to say about its subject matter and more to say about the filmmaker's pornographic proclivities.
In terms of the incident and what provoked it, "Bully" stirs up nothing new. The high schoolers are presented as a uniformly screwed up lot--bored with life, not much ambition, promiscuous, profane.
The bully in question, Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl), is certainly an unpleasant piece of work but he doesn't exactly tower over his colleagues in the pathological department. He hounds and harries and humiliates his "best friend" Marty (played by Brad Renfro) and Marty's girlfriend Lisa (Rachel Miner) doesn't care for it at all and comes up with the idea of killing Bobby. Simply remove him from the equation. Marty and Lisa and a handful of their promiscuous, profane, and stoner friends, plus a recruited hit man (?), lure Bobby to a swamp one night, stab him, beat him over the head with a baseball bat, and dump him into the canal where the sand crabs and the gators, presumably, finish him off.
There's no remorse--the next day they're talking about it as openly as a homework assignment. They did it because they wanted to, and because they could.
What's most troubling about the film, however, isn't the unsettling subject matter and the matter-of-fact way these young people go about eliminating one of their own but the way in which Clark is constantly distracted by his own material. Not only is the nudity plentiful and graphic in "Bully" but there's also an uneasy, exploitative feel to it. Gratuitous crotch shots abound (one of which makes the zipper cut-away in "There's Something About Mary" look like the height of subtlety!). Clark is so pre-occupied with his female (predominantly) leads that you forget, at times, what this movie is supposed to be about. The stripping bare, literally and figuratively, of these actors (who are, after all, playing underage teenagers) becomes harder to watch over time, as you begin to feel for them and question the motives of the man behind the camera.
The conclusion of "Bully" offers up literal snapshots of information about the sentences imposed on each of the protagonists for their involvement in the crime. It's a short sequence of stills--Heather: 7 years; Ali: 40 years; Lisa: life imprisonment, for example--but it's infinitely more telling than the 110 minutes of rampant unpleasantness that precedes it.
"Bully" aims for truth, exploits it shamelessly, then bludgeons it to death.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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