One of the most striking early scenes takes place in the gay club, where Bobby pushes Marty into dancing onstage with other jailbait for cash stuffed down briefs, and the music pumps and thrusts, and Marty goes from horrified shame to enjoying the power of knowing that men will pay to watch him shake his money-maker.
This is as good a place as any to deal with the biggest criticism thrown at Larry Clark films . . . gratuitous under-age sex. And my defence is . . . in tatters, actually. Objection sustained. At one point in Bully, Clark tosses in a completely pointless close-up shot of a girl’s crotch, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with, well, anything. It’s almost as if the guy is trying to make us feel implicated by giving us a boner while we watch kids do the very worst things we can imagine them doing. No idea what his problem is. You have to try and watch his movies around his attempts to turn you on with adolescent flesh.
Bobby’s bullying tendencies derive, of course, from a Bad Dad. Mr Kent, blissfully unaware of how depraved his son is, doesn’t approve of his friendship with Marty because he is a surfer slacker and leads a life ‘of complete aimlessness’, even though he was once ‘a good kid’. The double irony being that it is Bobby who has beaten the ‘ambition and fire in his gut’ out of Marty, and that, while Marty is begging his parents to move away from Bobby, Bad Dad is now threatening to move house to get Bobby away from Marty. Sadly, they all stayed.
The biggest shock of Bully doesn’t derive from flesh or rape scenes or even the murder itself. It stems from the possibility that there are these real kids out there who were as entirely stupid as the kids in this movie. Once the brutalized and pregnant Lisa (Miner) comes up with the murder idea, and the suggestible Marty agrees, her next course of action is to tell just about everybody – including friends like the chubby but timid Derek (Franzese), plus the perpetually stoned Donny (Pitt) and Heather (Garner) who have never even met Bobby – until it becomes some kind of open invite to a murder party. And then discuss it in public places in loud voices, even letting the waitress at Pizza Hut know what they’re up to. And then fuck up their first attempt. And then hire the world’s dumbest hitman.
In this world, where teens party like dissolute adults but think like small children, they believe rumours that a tough-talking kid called Derek Kaufman (Fitzpatrick, even better here than he is Kids, see here) is actually a hardened professional killer. After meeting initial reluctance, they eventually convince him to help them do the deed when they lure Bobby to a remote canal by the swamps.
Clark comes into his own with the tense build-up to the poorly planned killing, as we increasingly realise that the ‘hitman’ is as out of his depth as the six conspirators, and that only he, Marty and Lisa are truly determined to go through with it because the others believed it was some kind of stoner game. The droning guitar of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore ratchets up the tension and the excellent ensemble cast – including Bijou Phillips as another Bobby rape victim Ali – make you feel the stress and the dire consequences of the moment.
The murder is chaotic, almost comically inept. But murder is murder. Bobby dies partly because the prospect of sex blocks out all other thoughts, and partly because he has no idea that punching someone unconscious while they’re fucking and then raping their girlfriend might cause any lingering resentment.
The River’s Edge (see here) element goes into overdrive as the seven brag, snitch, lie and confess their way into arrest and court. As they sit in the courtroom, they descend into a shouting match about who did what to whom, as if the adults in the court can’t hear them. But they can. The movie ends with the sentences they received in 1995. Three of them – Marty, Lisa and Donny – are still serving time in Florida correctional facilities. Lisa’s child, who, according to the movie, could be Marty’s or Bobby’s, was born in jail.
It’s hard not to conclude that Clark – who first came to prominence as a photographer of drug-taking youth – is a right-wing film-maker in disguise. Kids, Bully and the enervatingly glum Ken Park are diametrically opposed to a left-wing teen movie like But I’m A Cheerleader (see here). In Jamie Babbitt’s upbeat satire, teen sexuality and polymorphous perversity leads to a fully realised self, romantic fulfilment, and a violence-free happy ever after packed with tofu casseroles and lipstick lesbians.
In Clark’s films, his teens have appeared to go from their first snog to rape, prostitution, babies making babies, drug addiction, ultra-violence and merrily spreading AIDS like someone taking their first sip of coffee in the morning and becoming a crack addict by teatime. What’s more, these mainly white kids all play out their Sodom And Gomorrah lives to a constant hip hop soundtrack, and talk exclusively in ebonic wiggerisms. In short, black culture is destroying our nice white kids. Frog-march ’em at gunpoint to a racial reorientation camp . . . now!
So why do I like Bully? Well, for a start, for a movie where you know the ending before it begins, it is incredibly suspenseful. The cast are superb. And . . . I admit it . . . I like its gleeful ‘Think that was bad? Watch this shit!’ embrace of liberal-baiting cinematic irresponsibility. It’s a thrill-ride, with an ironic ending that sticks in your throat and dares you to laugh at such tragic idiocy. What it tells you about kids of today, I don’t know. But it does remind you that jails are full of some seriously dumb motherfuckers.
CITY OF GOD
2002
Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino de Hora, Alice Braga, Phellipe Haagensen, Seu Jorge, Graziella Moretto
Dir.: Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
Plot: Good Favelas.
Key line: ‘Why remain in the City Of God, where God has forgotten you?’
City Of God was one of the great shock films of the early 21st century. The surprise wasn’t that it wasn’t American, or that two little-known directors had made something so hugely accomplished well outside the Hollywood machine, or that life was so tough in the slums of Brazil. The shock was that someone had finally stopped connecting the global reality that is teenage gangs to the sexy kitsch of ’50s juvenile delinquency, and pointed out the obvious: that kids with guns are more frightening and disturbing than men with guns.
City Of God takes young gangsters and the mayhem they cause deadly seriously, carries the full horror of youth nihilism caused by extreme poverty and state neglect, and still tells an epic tale that is fun to watch for action movie fans. It has beautiful stars, sexy moments, a stunningly conceived look, great gags, cinematic flamboyance, iconic compositions, scenes of ultra-violence that would make many a ‘100 Coolest Shoot-’em-up Moments’ list, elegant storyboarding and a novelistic ending both uplifting and grimly ironic. But, somehow, none of this obscures the point, which is that in poor parts of the world children are killing each other for kicks, drugs and chump change, and that, as long as those children keep their slaughters away from polite society, we turn a blind eye because the poor are less than human.
The movie is based upon the novel Cidade de Deus by Paulo Lins, which fictionalised real gangsters, victims and events in the titular favela (shanty town) that was built by Brazil’s military government to house homeless families from Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Its three acts deal with the late ’60s, the mid ’70s and the early ’80s, and the escalation of youth crime from petty theft with menaces to organised armies fighting wars to control the drugs that flooded the slums of the world in the 1980s. The denizens of the City Of God are almost all dark-skinned Brazilians, reminding us that it’s not just the northern hemisphere that distributes wealth according to pigmentation.
The plot is as labyrinthine as the City Of God’s rabbit-warren sprawl, but it focuses on two boys who pursue opposing paths to surviving the harshness of their environment, but are inextricably linked by the favela’s insularity.
Our hero and narrator is Buscapé, aka Rocket, a gentle, studious black boy and budding photographer whose brother Goose is in a Robin Hood-type criminal gang called The Tender Trio. When the three hoods decide to up their ante and progress fro
m knocking over petrol trucks to robbing a rich family in the city, their big mistake is allowing Rocket’s mirror image, Li’l Dice, to tag along. While the three older boys simply want to hold up the family and get out, their scary young protégé hangs around to murder the family, giggling merrily like a kid watching a cartoon.
Fast forward to the ’60s and, while Rocket (now played by Rodrigues) is discovering his love of photography and hanging out with a bunch of proto-hippies who call themselves The Groovies, Li’l Dice has changed his name to Li’l Ze (the excellent, chilling de Hora) and is taking control of the burgeoning drug trade by way of shooting everyone in sight and loving every second of it. The police approve because he is happy to pay them off and wipe out any loose-cannon criminals to keep the crime figures down.
Ze’s inexorable rise begins to turn into an equally inexorable fall when his smarter and calmer second-in-command, Benny (Haagensen) decides to leave the gang life and throws a party. As the funk blares and the dirty dancing commences, Ze’s status as the Alpha Male is undermined by his inability to get with the girlies. This is another of City Of God’s strengths, incidentally: the cliché of the hot girl who is attracted to any man with money and power is constantly avoided, and, while the story is about young men, the subsidiary female characters are strong women with dimensions who make their own decisions. This doesn’t mean that things end well for them. But that’s part and parcel of being trapped with reckless men with big weapons.
Anyway, Ze deals with his humiliation by humiliating a handsome ladies’ man called Knockout Ned (Jorge). The party spins out of control and Benny is killed. Despite Ned having nothing to do with Benny’s death, Ze has identified him as all-purpose scapegoat. He rapes Ned’s girlfriend and kills his uncle and brother. The formerly passive Ned is transformed into a nihilistic vengeance machine. He hooks up with Ze’s one surviving drug gang rival, Carrot, and launches a war that forces the police to intervene.
We are now in the ’80s. The war between Ze’s and Carrot’s gangs has become protracted and notorious. The problem for Ze is that Knockout Ned is getting all the newspaper publicity. Like all underclass gangsters, Ze wants his name to ‘ring out’, to become an iconic figure by being known to everyone yet seemingly immune to both death and arrest. He wants to be a celebrity. He’s also dumb enough to rip off an arms dealer, without wondering where his bag of state-of-the-art weaponry comes from. If he’d watched more gangster movies he would’ve known that the shadowy Mr Big is always a bent cop.
Cue Rocket’s role in Ze’s manic plans. Hearing that he is a photographer, Ze orders his lieutenants to bring him to his lair and demands he takes photos of his tooled-up gang and sell them to the newspapers. Rocket uses the photos to get his break at a newspaper but fears what will happen to him if Ze’s face is actually published. When an experienced reporter prints the shots without his knowledge, Rocket fears for his life. The reporter, Marina (Moretto), calms him down by taking his virginity. Despite Rodrigues’ winning smile, this older woman tangent isn’t the most believable part of the story, and does feel like wish-fulfilment for teen male viewers. But nobody’s perfect.
We are now back at a familiar place and recognising how cleverly the story has been constructed. In the movie’s opening scene, before we’ve met any of the characters, we’ve seen a gang chasing a chicken through chaotic passageways, a boy with a winning smile chatting to a friend about how to get a good photo without being killed, and a darkly comic climax where the boy suddenly finds himself in a no man’s land between a big gang of heavily armed kids and a smaller gang of heavily armed coppers. We are now back there, fully informed of how the boy got himself in this situation by the previous two hours of action. Beautifully staged mayhem ensues.
Now, before I go on, I should apologise to those who haven’t seen City Of God for being a big old spoiler. Because this movie is impossible to talk about without its magnificent ending; a climax that expertly balances a tying up of the two central tales and the realities of a situation which plainly has no resolution, and won’t get one, anywhere, until the world ends its phoney, bloody ‘war on drugs’ and deals with the planet’s need for a redistribution, not just of wealth, but of opportunity, education and hope.
The cops are outnumbered and back off. Rocket is ordered to take a picture of Ze and his triumphant army. They are too busy posing to notice that Ned and Carrot’s gang have outflanked them on their blind side. The dirty street is now a warzone.
Knockout Ned meets his maker courtesy of a young kid who infiltrated his gang because Ned murdered his father. We have no idea of the reasons behind this boy’s presence until now.
Rocket has managed to photograph the entire battle from a safe vantage point. He snaps the arrest of Carrot and Li’l Ze. The gangs have destroyed each other but the police arrive to pick off the stragglers and claim control of the streets. Rocket follows the story and sprints through the labyrinth, knowing every shortcut to catch up with the police van carrying the rival gang leaders.
Carrot is taken off to parade in front of the media, but the cops have other plans for Ze, and Rocket arrives in time to capture them for posterity. In an alley behind the cop shop, the policeman who supplies guns to the ghetto shakes Ze down for the money he owes for the weapons he stole. They let Ze go.
Ze is immediately approached by children we recognise. They are members of The Runts, a baby gang Ze terrorised earlier in the saga. They execute him, looking like toddlers firing water pistols. Rocket waits until The Runts leave and takes pictures of Ze’s bullet-riddled body.
We cut to Rocket examining the products of his day’s work. He looks at the shots of Ze and the gangs, and his voiceover tells us that these shots will get him magazine covers and his big break as a photojournalist. ‘But the cops . . .’ he says, and his magnifying glass moves over to the snaps that prove the Brazilian police’s connection to organised crime. His own question remains unanswered. The next shot is his photo of Ze’s body on the front of the newspaper. The boy may be brave. But he’s not stupid.
Another cut. It is a sunny day and Rocket is walking with his friend, talking about the photos he didn’t print and his forthcoming internship at the paper. His friend asks him if Marina was any good in bed. ‘I don’t think journalists know how to screw’, he replies.
His amusingly macho boast is the last we hear from our hero, because a gang of small children have taken his place in front of the camera. It is The Runts. They are carrying guns in the open, like toys, and excitedly discussing exactly who they are going to kill to take over the drug trade. We know, from earlier in the movie, that the favela is awash with myths and legends about various left-wing terrorist groups. One of The Runts asks, ‘Have you heard of the Red Brigade?’ Another answers, ‘No. But if they come, we’ll kill them.’ We watch them walk away, and a tiny boy, no older than four, runs to join them. A caption reminds us that this is based on real events, and Rocket’s voiceover tells us, with pride, that he is no longer Rocket, but Wilson Rodrigues, professional photographer. Cut to black.
The ending’s juggling of pessimism and optimism, and the ironies of fame and infamy and truth and myth, are so satisfying that even when you’re watching the movie alone on DVD, you want to give it a standing ovation. But it also flags up some of the darker life-imitating-art potential of the movie itself.
City Of God was a big global hit and attracted deserved critical acclaim, including four Oscar nominations. One of the reasons critics gave for admiring the film was that it didn’t glamorize violence. Don’t know what movie they were watching, but just because the teenage killers here aren’t wearing Armani suits and talking in repetitive catchphrases doesn’t mean the violence isn’t glamorous. There are enough shots of pretty young men dying thrilling cartoon deaths over evocative music in City Of God to satisfy the most desensitised Jason Statham fan. And Meirelles and Lund love their images of charismatic tough guys pointing their weapons right at us and blowing us away.
So whil
e the movie has a far bigger social conscience than most American and British gangster flicks, it still took real characters from a previously invisible area and made their names ring out around the world. One can imagine a teenage drug dealer in Cidade de Deus 2011 watching City Of God not as a cautionary tale about staying in school and getting out of the ghetto through hard work, but inspirational fare about how gunplay doesn’t just get you cash, drugs and immediate gratification, but could make you as famous as Al Capone, John Gotti . . . or Li’l Ze. It’s a sobering thought.
Not that I’m having a pop at City Of God’s talented makers. You shoot one of the all-time great true-crime movies and that’s the risk you take. Because City Of God’s genius lies in tangents – the horrifying shooting of a small child’s foot, a woman murdered for wanting better orgasms, the heat and funk and eroticism of Benny’s party, the police killing an innocent boy while the real perpetrator walks right through the bullets and into a church – that all tie in, eventually and wonderfully, to the twin spines of the main storyline, and make you feel like you’re watching a politicised black Good Fellas without the tips about cooking pasta sauce. Slumdog Millionaire borrowed its claustrophobic, heat-blasted, staccato style but left out City Of God’s genuinely uplifting truth that you don’t have to win a million on a game show to escape hell . . . hard work and talent and a refusal to conform can be your ticket. City Of God doesn’t make a song and dance out of Rocket’s hard won triumph. Compare the two movies and you have a definition of the difference between the ironic and the glib.
ELEPHANT
2003
Starring: Alex Frost, Eric Duelen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nicole George, Brittany Mountain, Timothy Bottoms
Dir.: Gus Van Sant
Plot: Grieving for Columbine.
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