Movie Review : Bully (2001)
It's customary in Hollywood to have thirty years old actor playing high school kids. Everyone is in on the joke today and it’s widely assumed that working with professional actors must be less complicated and more time efficient than working with literal kids. Iconic nineties film director Larry Clark didn’t think that way. That’s why his movies felt raw and real to a point they were often uncomfortable. He did the unnerving Kids in 1995, but his most fucked up endeavour is undoubtedly his 2001 movie Bully.
Bully tells the story of Marty Puccio (the late, great Brad Renfro), a troubled teenager who lives under the control of his abusive self-professed "best friend" Bobby (Nick Stahl) who enjoys hurting and humiliating him in front of an audience. When the two luck out and get themselves girlfriends, Marty’s girl Lisa (Rachel Miner) raised the idea that life would be a lot cooler if Bobby wasn’t there anymore. Bobby’s victims start elaborating a plan to murder his ass right there and then as well as teenagers can.
….yeah, it’s a complete shit show.
Becoming the Aggressor
Now, this is not a movie for everyone. Bully is raw and jagged from the get go. The violence it shows (whether it's casual or a life-and-death thing) is unnecessary and unromanticized. Larry Clark show brutality for what it is: a disease transmitted from a victim to another, turning them into aggressors. Bobby dominates his surrounding using strength, humiliation, sexual or physical confrontation, forcing them into a struggle for survival that doesn't need to be. It's painful and inevitable.
The recourse to violence against Bobby is never pictured as a moment of empowerment like it often feels like to victims, but rather as a stressful and complicated process that doesn't offer any guarantees. The result is a film that doesn't feel good at all, but that feels terrifyingly real. You're being told as story as much as you're being morally probed for past wounds and deviant behaviors. Bully is one of these movies you finish and wonder to yourself : what would have I done in this situation?
If you feel like I'm describing a PSA from 1993, you're not totally wrong. Bully doesn't have a moral argument to make about right and wrong behaviors when facing a violent situation (it implies all along that such an ending was inevitable), but it has an unnerving fatalism that you also find in cops trying to scare you straight or government officials trying to get you to "just say no". There's no one choosing peace in the movie either. It's never a consideration that the infection chain of violence can be broken.
The Agony and the Esctasy of Being Bobby Kent
The most interesting character in Bully is, of course, the titular meany Bobby Kent. He is a ghoulish person, but Bully always reminds you that Bobby is the way he is for a reason. Larry Clark never spells it out for you, but keeps throwing hints at you that he's being abused by his father. His obsession with making other people watch hardcore gay porn against their consent is perhaps the most resounding (I told you he's a ghoulish person). His old man is also the only person he never dominates.
Does Bobby deserve to die? Bully never really asks the question, but it raises the idea of crime and punishment and the immunity of youth. If Bobby’s allowed to victimize people for so long, it's because he's not an adult and the problems he causes are perceived as not-adult-problems. Marty is portrayed at some point as asking for his parents to step in for the hundredth time and all he gets for an answer is: tough luck, you're gonna have to wait it out if you want to move, kiddo.
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Not gonna lie: I loved Bully. It's an ugly, sweaty and difficult film, but it feels dangerous in the best possible way. It's a film that was made to be painful and that accepts that it is not for everybody. It's aesthetically as straightforward as possible, but it makes every visceral choice in the book and confronts you to the ugliness of being alive in a world that never gave a shit about you. Oh and it's totally based on a true story also. As if it wasn't intense enough to crawl under your skin on its own.
8.1/10
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