Fun (1995)

★
Fun is neither revealing nor intellectual. Rather, it is poorly executed and mostly irritating. How in the world can a movie survive when the two lead characters are rude, hopeless, psychotic and irredeemable, and are presented as such without any method of humanizing? I've seen good movies about bad people before, but Fun makes no attempt to analyze them, or even show us that they got the punishment they deserve.

Hillary (Renée Humphrey) and Bonnie (Alicia Witt) are two troublemakers that, as the movie opens, are in prison for murdering an elderly woman. Jane (Leslie Hope) is a counselor who works at the prison, and she feels that reporter John (William R. Moses) would do more harm than good by interviewing them. She reluctantly lets John talk to them.

The film is partially told in flashback form. The present is in black and white, while the past, which details the events leading up to the crime, is in color. The interviews don't go so well for Jane and John because Hillary and Bonnie are more interested in disrupting the sessions, running around the room, screaming and acting unpleasant.

When they first meet, Hillary and Bonnie form an instant friendship. In one day, they discuss their troubled backgrounds. It is this common past that brings them together. From there, they decide that the ultimate adrenaline rush would be to rob and kill someone. After knocking on several doors, mostly for laughs, they stop at one old lady's house. Mrs. Farmer (Ania Suli) lets the girls in because one claims to be sick. Bonnie then stabs her repeatedly in the chest.

I know what this film is trying to do. Director Rafal Zielinski is trying to make a disturbing movie about troubled characters. He presents them as stark and uncaring, films the murder in a grisly manner and then lets them talk because he thinks he's making a character study. It all goes wrong, because Bonnie and Hillary are so filled with hate that their scenes are monotonous. There's not a sense of what we might call a human being underneath their filthy desires.

I've seen plenty of better movies that have covered similar terrain. A recent film known as Bully also featured bad people who commit a ghastly murder, but that movie exposed the weaknesses of the killers. The director of that film, Larry Clark, showed us the faults and the cowardice that lurked underneath the cold exterior. In Fun, all we learn is that Hillary and Bonnie didn't have good childhoods. There's no other attempt to get inside their heads.

Yes, it is true that there are people out there who don't care about the lives they take. If a narrative requires us to spend time with them, then the director should present them as characters fleshed out for us to study. The alternative is to lock us in the same room with them for 100 minutes and leave it at that. Unfortunately, Fun accomplishes the latter.

© 2003 Silver Screen Reviews