The shadow of photographer turned writer/director Larry Clark’s 1995 debut Kids still loomed large over his third movie, the return to form that is Bully. But what was that form? Troubling, exploitative sleaze-o-rama or hard-hitting bulletin from the coalface of “real life,” take your pick. While in his second film, Another Day in Paradise, the director seemed at times unsure of his material, Bully, like Kids before it, shows us without hesitation and with absolute conviction a world of directionless teenagers in which adult supervision is at best ineffectually well-meaning and at worst non-existent. Indeed, as with Kids, the most obvious adult presence in Bully is Clark himself, via his camera as it lingers on naked skin or even lurks (at least in one notable shot) between the thighs of his teenage stars.
Based only somewhat loosely on the 1993 murder of teenager Bobby Kent by a group of his peers, Clark used the real names of the main protagonists and shot in and around the real locations. High school dropout Marty (Brad Renfro) lives in Hollywood, Florida and is resigned to the fact that he is constantly bullied, manipulated and ridiculed by his lifelong best friend Bobby (Nick Stahl). Marty begins a relationship with Lisa (Rachel Miner) and she quickly becomes pregnant. Lisa, like everyone in their circle, is abused by Bobby and, fearing the baby may be his after he raped her, suggests that Bobby needs to be killed. After discussing the idea with a dismayingly large number of friends and acquaintances, the couple work out a rough plan to murder him and dump his body in a canal and then, with the help of three other teenagers and a supposed “mafia hitman,” they do exactly that. Inevitably, they almost immediately get caught.
That is the story, but it’s the telling of it that makes Bully a remarkable film. As Roger Ebert, one of the movie’s high-profile defenders, pointed out, “Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment,” and indeed, “entertaining” is not one of the words that springs to mind when thinking about the film. Like John McNaughton’s deadpan and far more distantly connected to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), we see the characters in Bully going about their mundane business with no pretense that their lives are anything but banal. The Florida they inhabit is anonymous, sun-bleached and sterile; the alternate movie Florida of hedonism and parties on the beach is there, in the background, kind of. We see that, in happier days, Marty was himself a competitive surfer, but in the lives of the movie’s protagonists, the world has shrunk to casual sex – so casual in fact, that they are barely motivated by it – video games and aimlessly driving around while high on mediocre rap music and drugs.
The mostly very young cast is, without exception, magnificent, and at the movie’s core is the duo of Marty and Bobby. Renfro gives one of the best performances of his tragically brief career as the former. Mumbling, educationally subnormal, clearly less of a geek than Bobby, but obscurely vulnerable, Marty seems essentially nice but disastrously unassertive and hopeless. Stahl meanwhile is superb in a role that demands very little sympathy from the audience, but in the end gets a little anyway. Bobby is utterly repellent, sleazily manipulative, violent and abusive, but in his own way completely pathetic and in thrall to his authoritarian father. But the other characters give Bobby what power he has, and this seems one of the most essentially truthful of the film’s many insights. After all, they could simply stop hanging out with him or returning his calls. He is depicted as evil and clever by the standards of the group, but his stature among his peers is mysterious, and despite being the villain, he’s not murderously violent. The irony here is that, without his interaction with them, none of Bobby’s victims would be prone to such acts either. The movie’s overriding theme is coercion, not just the bullying that gives the film its title, but the coerciveness of group behavior and its consequences in a moral vacuum.
Although Clark at no point could be accused of expressing sympathy for either Bobby or his murderers, the movie only works because of his empathy for them. The group of conspirators seem individually to be more of a danger to themselves than anyone else. In an icily brilliant performance by Miner, Lisa is the character who states that Bobby has to go, but it hardly feels like an idea with much real conviction behind it, and the basic disconnect from reality that lies behind her scheme is shown almost immediately by the way she’s willing to discuss it with almost anyone. Then there’s her best friend Ali (Bijou Phillips), who along with Marty has the strongest motive for wanting rid of Bobby, after he violently rapes her while trying to make her watch gay porn. But although she is more or less in favor of the murder plot, she’s never particularly enthusiastic about it, but even so, she almost unbelievably agrees to have sex with Bobby again to lure him into in an initial murder attempt that fails.
The other protagonists’ motivation is even harder to fathom. Donny (Michael Pitt), seems so fundamentally goofy, hippy-ish and good-natured that his involvement in a murder is ludicrous; but in fact, he lands the first blow in the harrowing death scene. Pitt’s performance again is superb, channelling the good-natured boyishness that Michael Haneke presumably cast him for in the US remake of Funny Games, but thankfully leaving out the hackneyed would-be sinister quality he also displayed in that movie.
Rightly unconvinced of their murderous abilities, the group approaches “The Hitman,” a nameless character played with by admirably straight-faced authority by Kids star Leo Fitzpatrick, who they believe – but the viewer immediately doesn’t – is in some way a professional mafia killer. Although only a supporting character, “The Hitman,” who we mostly see hanging out with a bunch of much younger kids in his parents’ garage, is central to our understanding of the teenagers in Bully. Not only are they lacking a discernible moral compass, but – more crucially to the success of their plan – they are completely divorced from reality at a fairly basic level. Lisa, for instance, is able without too much trouble, to get hold of her mother’s gun. “The Hitman” meanwhile, makes it clear that, in his line of work, getting guns is neither quick nor easy, and suggests instead death by stabbing or beating, which is in fact what happens. The film’s most sympathetic characters, Heather (Kelli Garner) and Derek (Daniel Franzese), are essentially just along for the ride, but in the end the consequences for them are as serious as for the rest of the group.
The murder scene is again reminiscent of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Absolutely de-glamorized, de-dramatized even, it’s a gruelling few minutes where unenthusiastic, imprecise stabbing and beating becomes increasingly desperate as it becomes clear the victim is still alive. After Bobby is finally dead and perfunctorily disposed of in a canal, it’s clear that every member of the group is a weak link, and that before long their crime will be uncovered. After an uncomfortable scene where Marty is arrested at home by what can only seem, after the amateurishness of the murder, like a wildly disproportionate SWAT team, the movie ends and stark text tells us the fate of the murderers (all of whom are still alive). It’s an ending as abrupt as it is fitting; Bobby’s dead, these idiots killed him, and there’s not much more to say. And yet, the achievement of Bully is that Clark manages to make such a deliberately flat, affectless film so emotionally affecting. The cast has a lot to do with this; we may not like the characters, or understand them, but they are human beings, not ciphers. The kids may be vacuous to say the least, but the landscape they inhabit too is empty and anonymous, overlit, unsubtle, headache-inducing.
Rewatching it 20 years on, the troubling question of exploitation hangs over the film too, and isn’t easy to dispel. That these are heavily sexualized teenagers is fundamental to the film and the many, rarely happy, scenes of sex and nudity underline the narrow boundaries and skewed values of their strangely bleak and joyless existence. In one especially uncomfortable scene, Bobby’s father tries to engage in a man-to-man talk with his son about his future while Bobby stands naked in the bathroom; it’s mysterious why he would want to do this, but it feels like an insight into the kind of life that Bobby, whose confused sexuality seems to be at the heart of his relationship with Marty, is used to. More problematic are the seemingly random, almost Michael Bay-like shots – such as the upskirt moment mentioned above – that linger, especially on the female cast, when nothing in the story seems to suggest it. The charitable, and plausible, explanation is that Clark is immersing you in the world of these aimless teenagers and the mindset that allows everything else in the film to happen. Being in the company of these naked teenagers, we get to know them and understand them as much as we can. To the unconvinced, Clark seemed like a dirty old man in 2001, and in truth, time is unlikely to modulate that opinion very much. Bully remains an uncomfortable and deeply unpleasant masterclass in empathy and alienation, but it deserves to be seen.
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