‘Shrek?’ Dreck

If I advised you to see “Bully,” the new film about a group of casually homicidal teenagers with beautiful bodies and withered souls, and if I further advised you that “Bully” is actually purer in spirit than a cheerful crowd-pleaser such as “Shrek,” you would have ample reason to temporarily revoke my critic’s license, pending a thorough investigation of my fitness to dispense cultural commentary.

And if, during the ensuing probationary period, I not only continued to insist that “Bully” is morally superior to “Shrek” but also made a similar declaration about “crazy/beautiful,” another summer film about a teenager whose search for meaning is undertaken in a haze of sex and substance abuse, you would be entirely justified in recommending that my credentials be permanently stripped, that the pen be wrenched from my fingers like a disgraced general’s sword by an editor who was, he would later console me, “just following orders.”

That is how radical it feels to be on the side of “Bully” and “crazy/beautiful” against a film such as “Shrek.” But all three films, I believe, go about roughly the same business: exploring the end of innocence. It’s just that the first two do it honestly and forthrightly, while “Shrek” does it in a sneaky, backhanded, small-minded way.

The theme of lost innocence is overt in “crazy/beautiful,” as a troubled young woman rebels against the permanent disenchantment of adulthood; more subtle in “Bully,” in which aimless adolescents flail about in hopes of feeling something, even if that something is grief or shock or pain. In “Shrek,” however, the film itself undermines the very innocence it seems to embody. It makes fun of everything it purports to celebrate: fairy tales, brave journeys, friendship, trust. Too many of its jokes are subversive adult jokes, a snarled nest of insiders’ whispers.

If you’ve read anything at all about “Bully,” you know that the film is based on the true story of teenagers in Hollywood, Fla., who murdered a classmate. The profanity-drenched movie is so brutally honest in its depiction of the rough lives of these lost kids--their sex acts possess all the glamour of dropping a penny in a gumball machine in a dusty five-and-dime--that it was released without a rating.

Conversely, “Shrek” has been praised to its pretty blue animated skies for its wit and playfulness. What’s not to like about a movie with a chubby green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers)? Enough, I think, to make “Shrek”--with its drearily repetitive phallic jokes and smug, smarmy humor--darker of heart than “Bully” or “crazy/beautiful.”

Obviously, I’m not recommending that the millions of tykes who are flocking repeatedly to the sunny land of “Shrek” suddenly be rerouted to the dark, grungy worlds of “Bully” and “crazy/beautiful.” But I do believe that the latter duo actually reflect a more generous spirit than the slick, chipper “Shrek.”

For all of the stupid and even criminal behavior they chronicle, “Bully” and “crazy/beautiful” have a kind of soft, craggy honesty at their edges. They remind me of J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye” and its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who wants to rescue kids from the complicated abyss of adulthood. “I felt like I was sort of disappearing,” Holden muses, and maybe that’s why the teenagers in “Bully and “crazy/beautiful” cling to each other so fiercely: When you’re stumbling in the fog, you hang on to somebody to keep yourself from disappearing.

The makers of “Bully” and “crazy/beautiful” have their hearts in the right place, even if the worlds they show are shocking. “Shrek,” though, strikes me as exactly the kind of thing from which Holden wants to save kids: that contemptuous little smirk that ruins everything, that turns the wonder to dust.

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Julia Keller writes a column about culture for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Company.