NZIFF 2012 Review: ‘Bully’

Kids are bullied in schools every day. For some kids, the daily torture becomes too much to bear and they take their own lives. Or another’s.

Bully doesn’t offer any insight into why kids bully one another. It doesn’t offer the bullied any strategic moves to avoid being bullied. It simply puts a face to the millions of kids for whom going to school each day is an ordeal.

Filmed in various American states and towns, Bully follows several children as they struggle through the school year. There’s sweet, gawky Alex, a middle-schooler who gets called Fish-Face by his peers and is subjected to painful humiliations on the bus to school each day. There’s Kelby who came out as a lesbian and now faces harassment and hatred from her small town. And there’s smart, talented Ja’Meya whose daily journey to school became so traumatic she held a gun on the entire busload of kids and wound up in juvenile prison.

The adult figures presented here are shown to be ineffectual or uncaring. They can’t see what is going on under their noses or they only see a tip of the iceberg. When Alex’s parents complain to the school about his treatment on the bus the administrator claims she’s ridden the bus and the kids are model citizens. No one challenges her that of course kids behave when they’re being watched by an authority figure. It’s when they aren’t being watched that problems arise.

It’s hard not to feel for these kids, and the parents who speak here about the loss of their children after the bullying forced them to do the unthinkable. I had tears in my eyes when I heard about 11 year-old Ty taking his own life. An 11 year-old shouldn’t even know what suicide is, let alone feel desperate enough to use it.

But I don’t think this film went far enough. Showing bullying and its consequences is not enough – real, practical solutions for stopping it need to be investigated. And for this to happen, school administrations need to acknowledge that it is going on. The film makers state they want this film to be used as a tool in schools, but I can’t see how. Without offering anything but portrayals of bullying and parental grief the film has no role to play, except in raising awareness of a problem most kids are already all too aware of.

6/10