This is brave and honest film making, and it goes to other places, and other rural pockets middle America, than most film makers are willing to go. Parent after parent, and kid after kid, tell stories of enduring bullying in small-town schools, and honestly, one spends half of this movie wishing one could reach through the movie screen and comfort a crying kid, or worse, a grieving parent. Two of the kids have committed suicide, and we follow the parents' reconstruction of their kids' teasing and torment, as well as their efforts to prevent the same things from happening to other kids. We watch administrators shrug off the concerns of parents who say the schools have an obligation to protect the kids, parents saying the wrong things to kids who risk assuming the roles of punching bags for their peers, and kids plucky enough to fancy themselves a one-woman force for change in backwoods, Oklahoma. It's important to see it, it's poignant and affecting filmmaking, and it's a shame the MPAA ever considered giving this an "R" rating: doing so would have ensured this film never reached the people who need to see it the most.
The filmmakers allow parents and students to tell their own stories, with acoustic guitar accompaniment and minimal intervention, but I felt it presented a myopic view, even when those myopic eyes weren't crying heart-felt tears of sympathy. All of the sufferers of bullying hailed from backwoods and Bible Belt America, as if bullying isn't also an urban and northern phenomenon. All of the instances of bullying are treated as stories in themselves and causes in themselves, when I wondered if states cutting school district budgets to the bone, economic conditions worsening in former manufacturing towns, and biases against small-town living in the first place, weren't contributing factors to multiple, local causes, alongside the bullying. Finally, all of these bullying victims tell their stories, as if no one's ever raised a child before, and as if no one's ever professionally studied the phenomenon of bullying. Interviewing a child psychiatrist as to why people become bullies, asking a psychologist how people have responded to bullying productively, and even finding someone who grew up being bullied, but became a positive force for change, all would have evened out this documentary's presentation.
It's worth watching, and powerful for just letting people explore the instances of bullying in their own ways and their own words, but these filmmakers had other resources at their disposal--experts, psychiatrists, success stories, urban schools, guidance counselors--that could have added to, and this enhanced, this affecting portrait of families overshadowed by bullies.
The filmmakers allow parents and students to tell their own stories, with acoustic guitar accompaniment and minimal intervention, but I felt it presented a myopic view, even when those myopic eyes weren't crying heart-felt tears of sympathy. All of the sufferers of bullying hailed from backwoods and Bible Belt America, as if bullying isn't also an urban and northern phenomenon. All of the instances of bullying are treated as stories in themselves and causes in themselves, when I wondered if states cutting school district budgets to the bone, economic conditions worsening in former manufacturing towns, and biases against small-town living in the first place, weren't contributing factors to multiple, local causes, alongside the bullying. Finally, all of these bullying victims tell their stories, as if no one's ever raised a child before, and as if no one's ever professionally studied the phenomenon of bullying. Interviewing a child psychiatrist as to why people become bullies, asking a psychologist how people have responded to bullying productively, and even finding someone who grew up being bullied, but became a positive force for change, all would have evened out this documentary's presentation.
It's worth watching, and powerful for just letting people explore the instances of bullying in their own ways and their own words, but these filmmakers had other resources at their disposal--experts, psychiatrists, success stories, urban schools, guidance counselors--that could have added to, and this enhanced, this affecting portrait of families overshadowed by bullies.