(out of four)
By David N. Butterworth
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.
