BULLY
2001

July 17, 2001
Cinemateque at the Towne

A group of teenagers in a Florida town grow tired of being picked on by the school bully and lure him to a swamp where they beat him to death.

-->Directed.....Larry Clark [Kids]
-->Marty Puccio.....Brad Renfro [drug addict, The Client, The Cure, Sleepers]
-->Bobby Kent.....Nick Stahl [The Man Without A Face, The Thin Red Line]
-->Lisa Connelly.....Rachel Miner [estranged wife of Macaulay Culkin]
-->Ali Willis.....Bijou Phillips [Almost Famous]

This was the definition of a film that is nothing more than adolescent semi-porn masquerading as an issue movie. Just because the kids suffer prison as a consequence of their crime, doesn't make the close-ups of Bijou's crotch, or the bordering-on-rape teenage sex okay to show. I've been angry at Larry Clark since KIDS came out. KIDS was shocking, but ultimately had a lot of truth about how a particular set of kids in New York City had indiscriminate sex with each other and how acting that way in the age of AIDS was playing with fire. Then I read a piece in the Village Voice about how KIDS may have been the most widespread male-kiddie-porn film ever seen. The slow, misty shots of the pre-pubescent boys wrestling and smoking and drinking, all without shirts on, was far too prevalent to be incidental. When I saw KIDS again, I felt the exact same way as the Voice author. KIDS is still a worthwhile piece of film, but you have to get past the naked boys to get to its heart.

KIDS is a walk in the park compared to BULLY. Incidentally, I just saw Ebert and Roeper refer to this film as a 'masterpiece'. I've never disagreed with so many people about a single film. The story is simple: Marty and Bobby are lifelong friends. Bobby picks on Marty all the time, in private and in front of other people. There is a scene where Bobby pimps out Marty and makes him dance in another one of Larry Clark's fantasy sequences, this one an amateur night at a gay dance club. It is implied that Bobby pimps Marty out for actual sex but we don't see this. Just after this scene, Marty is driving Bobby's car and he hits the curb and Bobby yells at him and then hits him right in the nose, then he pulls his arm back and hits him again, full in the face. I don't know what kind of brain this Marty kid has, but at that point, the friendship is over. This isn't like an abused kid or an abused spouse type thing. These are high school kids. They can stop hanging out with each other. But for some reason Marty doesn't leave.

Lisa and Ali happen upon the two boys at their job and they end up going out that night and having sex in Bobby's car. Bobby grabs Ali's head and moves her into oral position while Marty and Lisa have sex in the back seat. The one truthful scene that is still in my mind is while Bobby's getting oral in the front seat, he looks in the back seat and watches Lisa's face the whole time. Lisa become smitten with Marty, even getting excited when she ends up pregnant. Ali likes having sex with Bobby, and on another day, he shows her a gay porn tape, which she doesn't want to see, before forcibly raping her.

These are terrible kids doing terrible things, but that's not what makes the film terrible. When Bijou climbs up to the front seat of the car from the back, the camera angle is on the floor and we zoom in on her crotch in her short cutoffs. When Bijou walks around the supermarket, her ass is hanging out of those same shorts. When Bijou is on the phone while getting a pedicure, we again get a crotch shot, which has nothing to do with the story or even any of the characters. The other three leads get the same treatment. It's one thing to show kids nude having sex. That's natural. But the lingering camera showing Renfro's shaking boxer shorts during the amateur dance night, and Bobby working himself up in front of a mirror, and two other characters having sex in a bedroom full of teenagers is just a fantasy come-to-life for the director. Miner, who is less exotic than the other women (girls) gets a bit better treatment. Her sex scenes with Renfro are for the most part pretty natural. She is naked a lot and not shy at all, which is probably an honest characterization. But Heather and that Leo-looking guy from Dawson's Creek and Bijou and Renfro all seem to me to be exploited in the name of anti-violence. That's what sickens me.

I'm a fan of exploitation films. I watch the 'skinamax' films on the Satellite. I enjoy porn. I talk openly to most people about most any topic, usually to the embarrassment of the other person. But I don't pretend that I watch 'Buttman' because I enjoy the travelogue aspect of seeing Montreal. I don't kid myself that it's more than it is. BULLY pretends to be art, but it is really a bunch of extremely attractive young people who were talked into scenes that they'll be embarrassed about in a few years. I just saw THE WAR ZONE which is about incest and has nudity and is extremely hard to watch, but not a second of it was exploitative. BULLY was entirely without any merit, until the actual murder begins to take place.

At this point, it gets scary and you can see the kids actually act a bit and they're all dressed and you wonder who will crack first. These scenes are just a hint of what Clark could have done had he not been so in lust with his cast. They are probably good actors, but we don't know that from this film.

Don't pretend to be a huge reflection on society's moral decay when you're nothing more than an erotic teen film.