Man, this is going to be a hard one to explain…
Okay, so this movie is as famous for its ratings battle as it is for the actual content of the movie. For anyone who doesn’t know (and is perhaps not alive on this planet), the film is about bullying kids and received an R-rating from the MPAA for using the word fuck a couple times. Harvey Weinstein (who produced the film) raised hell trying to get the rating into a PG-13, insuring the movie’s target demo of kids will get to see it, and so on…
However, none of that really changes the content of the film, and perhaps this whole ratings battle was engineered to disguise that the content isn’t so hot.
What Works: This story of a half dozen kids (almost all of them poor kids from red states) who get picked on at school probably is important to the target demo and is talking about an issue that’s a bit business-as-usual. Also, some of the kids like “Fish-faced” Alex—-who was born severely premature and wasn’t expected to live long—-will break your heart in the abuse they take.
What Doesn’t Work: What’s so hard to explain to people is that this movie isn’t nearly as good as it should be. It has chosen a good issue, but isn’t the best exploration of it possible. For starters, they interview no bullies, thus not examining a pretty significant portion of their documentary on nothing but bullying. Then, they don’t talk at all about the larger culture of bullying. How everything from hip-hop music to professional politics to corporate culture encourages people to be as aggressive and non-empathetic as possible. By not exploring the larger world at all, we’re left with an overly hermetic, limited, and somewhat stale documentary that says it wants to talk about a problem, but really feels more like a monologue.
One example of the filmmakers just not having the necessary curiosity this movie should, is that they ask no larger questions about red state intolerance, which is pretty jarring since nearly all of the kids are working class kids from flyover areas. That’s not to say that there’s no such thing as urban bullying (far from it) but for the movie to not even talk about the culture around the schools—-which is, of course, where every child picks up who they hate like marching orders—-feels like a very significant oversight. At one point, one kid says “I wish everyone in the world was the same so there wouldn’t be cool kids and uncool kids, rich kids and poor kids,” it feels lazy not to mention that he’s essentially describing socialism, and how vehemently the state he lives in hates that type of equality.
At the end of the day, we know kids are being bullied, we are told that the problem is getting worse (although that case is never fully presented), but what in that could we not also learn by watching any after-school special?
What I Would Have Done Differently: 1. Interview a bully. [And no, I don’t mean some of the “victims” in this film that could very easily be bullies for all we know, but don’t seem nearly as innocent as the movie makes them out to be.] 2. Ask him or her some questions. 3. At least examine the rise of bullying in adult culture and if technology (including internet comments that unleash everyone’s inner bully) is making people less empathetic.