The following review was recently published in Farrago Magazine, the student run magazine of the University of Melbourne.
A gangly fourteen year-old punched and strangled on the bus ride to school. A gay teen ostracised by his conservative classmates. An African American girl imprisoned for drawing her mother’s gun on her tormentors. And two sets of parents, on opposite sides of the bible-belt, whose respective children (one seventeen, the other only eleven) tragically took their own lives. These are the subjects of Lee Hirsch’s Bully, the big, hot-button, morally conscious documentary of 2012, a film which admirably highlights an important social issue…without ever really offering a solution.
I’m not doubting the good intentions of the film, which is well put together and frequently affecting. At the same time, Bully falls well short of actually providing an explanation as to why bullying occurs, or what anyone – parents, teachers, administrators, whoever – can actually do to prevent it. Repeatedly, interview subjects say that the issue is extremely complicated, and yet Hirsch seems perfectly happy to boil it down to a series of tear-jerking tragedies, trotting out victim after victim without ever actually talking to a bully (or perhaps more relevantly, the parents of one).
If a few kids watch the film and are nicer to their peers as a result, then I suppose that the whole thing was worthwhile. But revelatory documentary filmmaking it is not.
Check out my interview with Bully director Lee Hirsch here.
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