After almost a full year traversing the film festival circuit and fighting a very public dispute over its R rating in the U.S., director Lee Hirsch’s (Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony) affecting call to action against America’s bullying crisis, Bully, is finally getting the wide release it deserves.
Developed in tandem with a social action campaign – The Bully Project – the film’s message is pure. However, Bully is not the definitive documentary on the bullying problem that Hirsch intends it to be.
Whatever its problems as a documentary, Bully is an absolute must-see documentary for children and adults alike. Whether it’s a concerned parent or a 12-year-old who can’t even watch the PG-13 film without a guardian, Bully is likely to strike a chord with any viewer.
The way the movie frames its narrative is its strongest attribute. Hirsch does a fantastic job of weaving several threads of story within the larger context of the bullying epidemic. Bookended by the story of Tyler Long’s suicide – which was prompted by bullying – Bully offers numerous perspectives on the issue.
These perspectives include the story of Alex, a 12-year-old boy unable to admit his physical harassment to his parents, and Kelby, a 16-year-old girl who came out as a lesbian to her Oklahoma community only to be made an outcast. Hirsch also captures stories from worried parents and stressed school officials, providing a generous view of the problem.
However, Bully does not succeed in offering a full panorama of the isuse. There are no answers or suggestions on how to solve the problems of bullying, merely the indication that they need to be solved. Without offering a direction in which to take the fight against bullying, the movie’s ubiquitous bleakness becomes its defining emotional characteristic while simultaneously allowing Hirsch to sidestep the social complexities of the issue and simply wag a finger at bullies and inept school officials.
Hirsch makes his most glaring oversight by not interviewing or profiling any actual bullies. Focusing solely on the victims and their families allows the director to toy with the viewers emotions as he pleases, but without the perspective of the perpetrators, there is no way for audiences to craft a well-informed understanding of the issue.
Instead, Hirsch spends most of the movie attempting to force emotion out of the audience instead of letting viewers decide for themselves how to react to the narrative. For instance, the film has several unnecessarily long takes of children and parents crying over one issue or another. These scenes add nothing to the film’s message and instead come across as cheap tricks.
Bully never fulfills its promises as a documentary, but its stories have a lot of potential to jumpstart the attached social movement. As is often the case, awareness and admittance are the first steps to solving a problem. Though it offers no solutions – and for that matter, very little hope of universal change – Bully, at the very least, can act as that first step toward change.
VERDICT: While it offers no solutions and often relies on cheap emotions, Bully‘s documentary portrayal of peer abuse is an alarming call to social action.
berman@umdbk.com
