Bully misses big picture

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ALLIANCE FILMS Alex, the prime subject of Bully, is an irresistible target. (CP)

Tormented as we are by loud talkers and texters in movie theatres, film critics tend to be mostly quiet and well-behaved at screenings.

But I must confess, I lost it at a screening of Bully, groaning, gesticulating and even shouting at the screen.

I hasten to add: It was a press screening. I was alone in the theatre.

The documentary is just one of those films likely to arouse that kind of outrage. Director Lee Hirsch looks at the subject of bullying from the perspective of kids who are bullied in school, as well as the grieving parents of kids who took their own lives when the incessant bullying grew fatally intolerable.

Hirsch's access allowed him into one school where a school administrator demonstrated the central problem the institution has in dealing with bullying. Apparently, to even acknowledge bullying takes place is to admit liability. And since schools appear to be more concerned with protecting themselves from lawsuits than they are with actual education, administrators seem to wilfully turn a blind eye to the problem, which naturally exacerbates the bullying.

Of course, there is also the problem of sheer foolishness. Hirsch's camera misses one episode of schoolyard bullying but captures the aftermath, as an assistant principal confronts both bully and victim in a hallway. She asks the two boys to shake hands. The alleged bully's hand shoots forward in a highly dubious gesture of manly reconciliation. The victim is reluctant to shake it. The assistant principal chastises the victim.

It's a good thing I didn't have a candy wrapper or a popcorn box handy as I would have thrown it at the screen.

The prime subject of Hirsch's attention is Alex of Sioux City, Iowa, a kid with no real school survival skills. (He plaintively asks a bigger kid on the bus if he'll be his buddy. The foul-mouthed response he gets is one of the reasons the movie got that absurd R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.) Even with Hirsch's camera visible on the bus, the other kids on the bus find Alex an irresistible target for punching, hitting and generally assaulting. It gets so bad, the filmmakers actually have to show their footage to parents and teachers out of fear for Alex's well-being.

We don't actually see another kid getting bullied but we hear about it from 16-year-old Oklahoman girl Kelby, a lesbian who endures abuse from both students and teachers. Proving that you never really get out of the schoolyard, Kelby's parents admit to being ostracized by neighbours after their daughter chose to come out.

Finally, Hirsch focuses on not one but two pairs of parents who have lost their children to suicide, presumably because of the bullying they endured at school. All four parents are motivated to activism, with one mom using the room where her son hanged himself as a base of anti-bullying operations. The parents conceive of an action plan whereby all students and witnesses intervene to prevent bullying.

It gives the documentary a hopeful conclusion, but it feels like a gratuitous happy ending.

Hirsch never thinks outside the box, sticking to a little-picture view of the issue, missing the larger issues of the institution of school itself.

Many schools have metal detectors to check for weapons, and have instituted regular searches of lockers for miscellaneous illegal goods. When violence erupts, the school is said to go on "lockdown," the same term we use in the world of prisons.

Just asking: When schools treat their students like prisoners, should we really be that surprised when they act like prisoners?

Hirsch might have easily found kids who opted out of school altogether in the face of dangerous violence to school at home. They're out there. But the director plays it dismayingly safe, looking for answers within a system that is demonstrably, hopelessly compromised.

I'm unconvinced parents of a dangerously bullied child should be asking themselves not what the institution should be doing for them.

Maybe they, and Hirsch, should be asking a question out of Investment Economics 101: Is the benefit of a school education worth the risk?

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Bully.

Bully is less a checklist plan for eliminating abusive behaviour than an emotionally powerful wake-up call for a society too long in denial.

-- Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Bully is a good start to a necessary conversation, but its loving voice is likely to be drowned out by haters who hide their own wounded hearts behind Internet pseudonyms and broadcast microphones.

-- Joe Williams, St. Louis Post Dispatch

The best Hirsch's film can do, in the end, is remind us that bullying means more than we admit, and its effects aren't always immediately clear, even to loved ones.

-- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

We feel sympathy for the victims, and their parents or friends, but the film helplessly seems to treat bullying as a problem without a solution.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Tackles this headline-heavy topic by mixing moments of raw emotional power with intervals of somewhat suspect manipulation.

-- Rick Groen, Globe and Mail

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Bully

Directed by Lee Hirsch

Grant Park

PG

94 minutes

2 1/2 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 27, 2012 D8