DIRECTOR
Rafal Zielinski
SCREENWRITER
James Bosley
based
on his play
PRODUCERS
James R. Zatolokin
Rafal Zielinski
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jens Sturup
MUSIC
Marc Tschanz
EDITORS
Monika Lightstone
Barry S. Silver
CAST
Renée Humphrey (Hillary)
Alicia Witt (Bonnie)
William R. Moses (John)
Leslie Hope (Jane)
Ania Suli (Mrs. Farmer)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 105m
U.S. release: April 14, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
|
It
would be too easy to call Fun the best movie about murderous
teenage girls since Heavenly Creatures -- and also inaccurate.
Given a brief art-house run in early 1996 (after playing at Sundance),
Fun was made in 1993 -- around the same time that Peter
Jackson was on the set with Kate Winslet, coaching her on how
to bash a woman's head in with a brick. In other words, fans
of Jackson's film owe it to themselves to see this raw, very
American take on the same theme.
Fun stars Alicia Witt (later in Cecil
B. DeMented and Vanilla
Sky) as Bonnie, a hyperactive misfit with flyaway red
hair that suggests electricity coming out of her brain, and Renée
Humphrey (Mallrats)
as Hillary, a brooding poet with a history of sexual abuse by
her father. They meet by chance on the side of a highway and,
over the course of a day, become instant soulmates. They shoplift,
try on makeup, hit the arcade, go door-to-door harassing strangers,
and, oh yes, they charm their way into an old woman's house and
stab her to death "for fun."
The movie alternates between present-day footage of both girls
in juvenile detention (shot in gritty hand-held b&w) and
flashbacks of the long and fateful day (shot in lush, golden
color). In juvie, a frazzled counselor (Leslie Hope) -- herself
a former delinquent who turned herself around -- tries to reach
the girls, while a slick magazine writer (William R. Moses) interviews
them for a hard-hitting article he plans to publish. Of the two
adults -- the woman who's been there and the guy who's exploiting
them -- the girls trust the reporter more, one of the movie's
sly twists. The counselor has too much contempt for the girls
(and for the flashes of her former self she sees in them) to
reach them, while the reporter offers to pull strings so the
girls can see each other again.
The actresses shared a Sundance Jury Recognition award, well-deserved.
Witt's nonstop chatter and spastic movements take some getting
used to -- my heart sank at first: "Oh, no, it's a Shine
performance." But after a few scenes you realize that Bonnie
is actually a bright, hyper-verbal girl whose intelligence has
gotten mired in her emotional wreckage. As Witt shows us how
lonely, deluded and needy Bonnie really is -- she's a liar-fantasist
who craves attention -- her performance becomes deeply moving.
Unlike Geoffrey Rush's Oscar-begging turn in Shine, there's
nothing remotely cute or life-affirming in Witt's portrait.
Humphrey has the straighter and, in some ways, harder role --
she underplays and holds her own with the flamboyant Witt. She
gives her most painful lines a casual verbal shrug -- talking
about her father's rape of her as if it happened to someone else
on TV -- that breaks your heart a little, because that's pretty
much how numb girls like Hillary do talk. And she's chilling
when Hillary talks to the counselor about the murder: "My
mom gets these letters saying I'm a monster, and I don't know,
maybe I am. 'Cause, man, we were like werewolves."
Fun was directed by Rafal Zielinski, a Canadian whose
previous claim to fame was cheezoid teen sex comedies of the
'80s, like Screwballs, Loose Screws, and (in a
daring departure from the screw motif) Valet Girls. It's
safe to say Fun represents a quantum leap in maturity
and filmmaking for him, on a par with Carl Franklin's leap from
Full Fathom Five to One False Move. The transitions
from past to present are deftly handled; the murder is one of
the most upsetting things I've ever seen in a film, and I've
seen it all. I was reminded of the home-invasion scenes in Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer, Man Bites Dog, and, yes,
A Clockwork Orange. And as a comment on the cycle of abuse
and the effect of pop culture on warped psyches, it kicks the
shit out of Natural
Born Killers.
The movie isn't perfect; as I said, it's raw. The back-and-forth
of the dialogue is often too rapid to be realistic (as was also
the case in Clerks)
-- maybe out of necessity, because Fun was shot in just
eight days. And Zielinski tries one idea that doesn't quite work:
a speeded-up montage of the girls' pre-murder activities. The
sequence begins well, playing like an '80s teen flick from the
planet of dread, but it goes on too long. But these are minor
flaws. I popped the video into the VCR at 11 pm, planning to
watch a little before bed and catch the rest in the morning;
it woke me up and kept me up, feeling as if I'd been drop-kicked
in the stomach. Fun doesn't deliver on its title. It delivers
something else. |
