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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW
Bully
In America, Where Some Adults Let The Bullied Suffer
Alex, the central subject of Lee Hirsh's documentary "Bully".
The Weinstein Company
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Tuesday,
April 17,
2012
The
pre-release ratings furor surrounding Lee Hirsch's new documentary "Bully"
doesn't obscure the fact that it is a very insightful and clear-headed account
of five families whose pre-teen or teenage children have either been
incarcerated, hounded or committed suicide (in two cases), as a result of
incessant bullying in school.
"Bully"
is profound in its simplicity and the eloquence of the young, authentic,
intelligent voices that speak with reason, sensibility and calm. They are
the new adults of the future. The adults of the present (at least some of
them) are kids who still haven't grown up in their mentality toward addressing
an epidemic problem. (The film's website states that "13 million kids will
be bullied this year.")
Alex (in photo above) is 12. He is bullied tirelessly at school in Iowa.
On a school bus Alex is teased, tormented, hit, spat upon by other kids and
classmates. He doesn't fight back. He comforts himself into
believing he's only being toyed with, and that the kids "don't mean it" or are
"just joking". Alex's parents think otherwise. The school
administrator handles the situation with "kid" gloves, patronizing Alex and his
parents.
Alex is the awkward, charismatic center of "Bully", and Mr. Hirsch frames a
balanced perspective not only in the film's five absorbing, intimate stories --
including of Ja'Meya, 14, a quiet Mississippi girl who brings a gun on a school
bus to defend herself after months of bullying and faces the full weight of the
law -- but also from teachers and administrators, including a sincere, committed
assistant principal in Alex's school.
Alternating between harrowing incidents caught on camera and heartfelt personal
accounts, "Bully" asks whether schools are responsible for unsanctioned violent
acts that occur on their premises or whether parents need to take an even more
active stance to protect their children. "We can't be there every single
second," one parent says. What about bullying off the school premises?
How about
this?
Left largely unspoken but palpable in its deafening silence (or absence) is the
800-pound elephant lurking in every classroom: the potential that the bullied
will commit a school massacre on the level of Columbine or Virginia Tech or on
any scale whatsoever. Or by self-ending life, as Rutgers University
student Tyler Clementi did in 2010. Floating in the film's tense, heavy,
sorrowful ether is the violence of American society in general and the nation's
desensitizing to it. Many of the school's teachers and administrators
suffer from that same numbness or blindness and by implication don't feel their
job description calls upon them to be referees in a playground battle royale.
The idea is that kids will be kids, and that getting hit is part of the
initiation of youth. (There's also a certain American mentality of "sink
or swim", "you're own your own", "you're not my child so you're not my
responsibility" that permeate some of the adult responses to the issues in
"Bully".)
"You two need to work out your issues together," one hapless admin says to Alex,
not long after he has been threatened. It's an aggravating, pathetic
response by an adult, whom herself fails to work out or resolve the very issue
which she is charged to. (I don't remember whether or not this particular
admin has kids of her own, but if she does, shame on her. If she doesn't,
shame on her, too.)
While "Bully" shows us pros and cons and reveals self-indicting adults and
overzealous responses to potential violence from law enforcement, along with a
series of reasoned, courageous children particularly at passionate, emotional
town hall meetings, the film's fulcrum moment is the overwhelming nationwide
activism to end bullying. Often from tragedy emerges a powerful, unifying
movement (hence the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin: a nationwide
movement to seek justice and stop violence.)
Bullying is ubiquitous. In the corridors of the home it is learned from
parents, from television, from the stimuli of a violent world, from government
officials and governments who go to war, unprovoked. Bullying doesn't
start in junior high or high school. In my daughter's daycare class there
is a bully who is three years old. (He's in a different section from my
daughter.) The parents who have kids in the same section as the bully have
complained but nothing has been done. Many of those parents have pulled
their children out of the daycare center as a result. Still, the bully
reigns.
I liken the above to a sexual harassment situation: an employee is told to
report it and that workplaces don't tolerate it, but when a woman (or man)
reports it, in numerous instances the workplace summarily discharges the accuser
and/or tells the accused that he (or she) has been "ratted" on. "Bully" is
as much about the adult avoidance of confrontation (in dealing with serious
issues) and "looking the other way" as it is about the pervasive violent
incidents of a beleaguered child's day.
In "Bully" Mr. Hirsch has offered up a timely, important film, and as with
Michael Moore's "Bowling For Columbine", it probes answers to sometimes
unanswerable questions. That the director is asking them is a start, which
is precisely what "Bully" is: the thoughtful, complex and carefully-measured
beginning of a discussion that has no end. To parents and school
administrators of America: it's flowers of hope and power or funerals of
helplessness and pain. Take your pick.
"Bully" is not rated by the Motion Picture Association Of America.
It contains violence and foul language. The film's
running time is one hour and 39 minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2012. POPCORNREEL.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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