USA, NR, 113 m, 2001
Directed by Larry Clark. Stars Nick Stahl, Brad Renfro, Rachel Miner, et al. 

Larry Clark’s Bully appropriates the same flat, pseudo-documentary technique used in the director’s preceding effort, Kids, and like that overprized lump of debris, Bully is just a shabby exploitation flick masquerading as social commentary. You can’t help but feel sorry for the film’s talented young cast: they bare their souls (and bodies) under the assumption that they’re involved in the making of something notable here, but they’ve all been hoodwinked by a lowly provocateur. I don’t know how Clark gains the confidence of his actors; they all seem willing to go as far as he’ll push them. But Clark isn’t an honorable director; he’s a dirty old man that salivates over any opportunity to depict his adolescent thespians in the buff. Bully’s plot is the stuff of B-grade revenge fantasies, so it’s jarring when Clark cuts away from the action to unblushingly ogle an actress’s crotch. The lascivious camera work doesn’t serve the storyline in any defensible way; it’s offered up to give pubescent viewers (and maybe pedophiles) a cheap thrill. There isn’t much in Bully to separate it from the late-night rubbish on Skinemax, but Bully manages to be twice as repugnant because it drapes itself in the pretext of being an earnest scrutiny of contemporary American teen culture. Yet many have fallen for the filmmaker’s hollow pretensions. Inexplicably, mainstream critics on the order of Roger Ebert and Kevin Thomas have lavished this shameful piece of soft-core kiddy porn with bouquets of orgasmic prose. But I shouldn’t be surprised. Ebert, after all, is the same tubby pervert that sent us to such sleazy fiascoes as Happiness and Eyes Wide Shut. The brazen sordidness of Bully is right up his alley. 

Based upon Jim Schutze’s novel, which professes to be a chronicle of a real-life happening, Bully stars Nick Stahl as Bobby Kent, a Hollywood, Florida rich kid with a gravely maladjusted set of relationship skills. When he’s not smacking around his best friend, Marty (Brad Renfro), he’s forcing the big doofus to do a bump and grind on the stage at a gay strip club. (You might take Bobby’s preoccupation with humiliating Marty as a sign of bound homosexual tendencies.) An emotional wreck, Marty blubbers like a twist (there are even strands of phlegm dangling from his mouth) to his girlfriend, Lisa (Rachel Miner), about Bobby’s abusive ways. But the psychotic Bobby is soon screwing up Lisa’s head, too: he barges in on her and Marty while they’re having sex, and declares emphatically, “My turn!” He then knocks Marty senseless, ensuring himself some privacy while raping Lisa. (The unfortunate Miss Miner is required to spend much of her screen time in the buff, the voyeuristic camera often loitering on her unkempt pie.) Alas, Bobby isn’t your typical teen-age ruffian: his stony hearted conduct is downright felonious. 

Needless to say, Marty and Lisa (as well as their circle of suburban slacker chums, all of whom are spoiled stupid) have had their fill of Bobby’s rapes and beatings, so they decide to off him. (Believe it or not, all of this was taken word for word from Schutze’s tawdry tome.) The simps hire the neighborhood’s alleged hit man (Leo Fitzpatrick, whom I loathed in Kids, but rather enjoyed here) to help do Bobby in, but after they send the twisted puke to his eternal reward (in the Glades with its sand-crabs and alligators), they spend the rest of the film’s (very long) running time bickering amongst themselves and, of course, spoiling their alibis. (This is all suggestive of The River’s Edge, but with bigger nincompoops.) Does Clark really expect us to recoil at the sight of these vapid loafers bumping-off their tormenter? It seems to me that Bobby got what he deserved. I wish I knew what Clark was trying to say with all of this. The best that I can gather is that he believes kids today are scum. Well, that may be so. But, hey, Uncle Larry, who’s the scum with a camera nosing around the cunt hairs of an unsuspecting juvenile actress?  

August 30, 2001

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.