Larry Clark's important film Kids was a wake-up call for a lot of people in 1995. It dared to ask a lot of perturbing questions. Do we really think we know what young people in inner cities are doing? Have we got a clue as to the kinds of influences and pressures they're under? Will the kids of today be the criminals of tomorrow? Bully follows up on these themes and ideas, but it is far from a sequel or a retread of Kids. For one thing, it's based on a true story, and, for another, this time around there are consequences to the children's actions.
It all takes place in south Florida. A couple of guys named Bobby and Marty are bored co-workers and beach surfers without any real direction. Bobby has made a habit of beating on Marty both physically and psychologically since they were kids. He also commits disturbing acts of violence, sexual assault and depravity on others to mask his own homosexual impulses. He is a bully in the deepest, darkest sense of the word. Marty's new girlfriend is Lisa, and because she believes Bobby's taunts are causing irreparable harm to her beau and the rest of her friends, she suggests having the bully killed. Thus begins a haphazard plan that involves a hit man, baseball bats and knives, and a shocking lack of foresight.
The movie may depict immature people, but it has been filmed to be viewed by a mature audience. There is an astonishing amount of nudity and sex in the movie, particularly by the two leads, Rachel Miner (Lisa) and Brad Renfro (Marty). In fact, Bully was lambasted by critics when it was released. They labelled director Larry Clark as a voyeur interested only in showing copious amounts of teen pornography. In truth, Miner and co-actress Bijou Phillips (Ali) were 21 years old when the film was made, and were certainly within their rights to decide whether they wanted to be in the scenes or not without this particular critique being warranted. Speaking for myself, I found the graphic nudity distracting at first, but as the film unfolds the nudity parallels the morals that are being stripped from the characters as their dark plot progresses. In a strange way, the envelopes that are pushed are necessary in order for the second act -- which is the murder itself -- to work.
The sheer nature of the screenplay of Bully requires a great deal of its actors and on all counts the cast delivers. I didn't even recognize half the faces until the end credits started to roll. Miner and Renfro are mesmerizing, but so is the increasingly versatile Nick Stahl as the maniacal Bobby. Dawson's Creek alum Michael Pitt plays a clueless stoner quite well, and Leo Fitzpatrick returns in his second Larry Clark film, this time as the only character who seems to have actually scratched together more than two thoughts.
Clark's point here may be to point out that this story is the story of many of the people in our prisons today. These are the people who acted first and thought about what they'd done only after the fact. Clark made a crucial decision in 1995's Kids to only show one parent in one scene in the entire movie. In Bully, parents are peppered throughout the screenplay, but for unexplained reasons they either seem entirely clueless to what their own kids are doing, or could care less and are deciding to turn the other way. Regardless, it's definitely the film's biggest flaw, because every time an artificial mother or father appears at a doorway, it breaks the devastating realities that have come before it. All the same, this is a movie of raw and unflinching scope and power.
