Bully - Chris Chapman

Bully Lions Gate Films 2001 Directed by Larry Clark Written by Zachary Long and Roger Pullis Based on the book Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by , Jim Schutze As a photographer, Larry Clark has, since the late 1960s, documented the sex and drugs lifestyles of certain groups of American youth. His classic photobook Tulsa put him on the map, and since then he has produced various bodies of work that focus on the intensities of that period in life that might generally be called adolescence. His 1980s book Teenage Lust was more about sex than drugs (but for Clark, they are almost always connected), and his colour photographic works of the 1990s heightened the intensity by zooming in on the markers of puberty: wisps of hair on boys' cheeks and upper lips, skateboard-grazed legs, drops of sweat. Clark also made really interesting, if lesser known collage works: groups of photos, newspaper clippings, notes, sometimes objects like skateboards and t-shirts, that spoke about youth violence, suicide and the unrequited love of parents and peers. Clark's film Bully is his third (following the infamous KIDS, and the recent Another Day in Paradise). Bully is based on a true story where a group of Florida teenagers murdered one of their own, the motive being his continued harrassment and bullying behaviour. The trademark intimate camerawork and closeup heat is there, but a few things seem to grate. Clark seems most at home with subject matter set against a gritty backdrop: the rural landscape of Tulsa, Texas; the downtown grime of New York city. The aqua and pink bedlinen, tropical locale, and convertible sportscars of Bully seems more Beverley Hills 90210. The story is a powerful one but it is under-developed. The chain of events that lead to the murder of Bobby Kent (played by Nick Stahl) are hazy and haphazard, which may of course have been the case, but this makes the murder seem too inexplicable. Perhaps being unfamiliar with Florida ambience, Clark has tagged the film with unnecessary references to his interests outside the film: a collage of posters reads uncannily like a Clark installation, there are intimate scenes between younger and older brothers that are incidental to the narrative. Critics have suggested that Clark's lingering shots of the teens' sexual antics, and of the young naked female actors in particular are gratutitous; and that the murder scene is unnecessarily drawn out. I didn't find this to be the case: teen intimacy has always been a biggie for Clark, and, the muder scene is brutal without being overtly goresome. The film ends with a roll-call of the characters and the sentences each received. This is the most shocking aspect of the story. The sentences seem extraordinarily heavy, with several receiving life imprisonment. Bobby's best friend Marty Puccio (played by the beautiful Brad Renfro) was almost always a bystander to the entire sordid chain of events, an endless victim of Bobby's taunting. He was executed. Chris Chapman