Bully

Larry Clark’s powerful, but problematic rendering of a real-life 1993 murder-case paints a disturbing portrait of bored, disaffected American youth and the moral void that they inhabit.

Unfortunately, the film’s voyeuristic nature often makes Bully disturbing for the wrong reasons.

The plot centres twisted teenage bully Bobby Kent (Renfro) – the kind of dick-head that finds pleasure in twisting his best mate’s ear or seriously sexually assaulting a girlfriend while he watches gay porn. Naturally, his best friend Marty (Stahl) finds himself the recipient of most of Bobby’s sadistic abuse, until finally Marty’s girlfriend Lisa (Miner) persuades him that the world might be better off without their primary tormentor, as she and her friend Ali (Phillips) have both been raped by Bobby. Not having anything better to do, various friends decide to help out with Bobby’s killing, among them the drug-addled Donny, the oblivious Heather and a pathetic would-be ‘hit-man’(Leo Fitzpatrick, the star of Clark’s controversial Kids) who even needs a lift to murder site.

Inevitably, the entire enterprise is horrifically botched and makes for a harrowing and tawdry spectacle.

However, Bully is far from a film about a terrible revenge on a sadist. Bobby Kent is only marginally less sympathetic than the rest of the gallery of teenage grotesques on offer. Their lives are pointless – they do prostitution for kicks, have no conscience regarding their actions as a group and are already such major acid casualties that they can barely determine what’s going on in video games. They are a bunch of spoilt, middle class American suburbanites bemoaning their lack of prospects in the most affluent society on the planet. It’s hard to feel their pain, especially as the film makes it explicit that the murder occurs as a consequence of the characters’ terminable boredom rather than the upshot of any personal grievances.

As such Bully is arguably an important film and essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the culture behind such tragedies as Columbine yet the entire project is undermined by the unnecessarily graphic depiction of teenage sex. Even critics who have previously defended Clark’s voyeuristic tendencies (in Kids or photography collections Teenage Lust and Perfect Childhood) have had difficulties with Bully, and one scene in particular – showing a naked teenage girl on the toilet – wouldn’t cut it in an issue of Barely Legal.

Nevertheless, Clark must be commended for making the least glamourous movie about teenage angst imaginable (including Gummo) and while this is the opposite of entertainment, it’s certainly challenging, if more than a little sick. Difficult viewing for a multitude of reasons.