Main Cast: Alicia Witt, Renee Humphrey, William R. Moses, Leslie Hope, Ania Suli
Release Year: 1994
Country: US
Run Time: 105 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Bonnie (Alicia Witt) and Hillary (Renee Humphrey) are two seemingly average California teenagers who have some very heavy emotional baggage to lug around. Bonnie was abandoned by her mother years ago, and Hillary was sexually assaulted by her father, who is now behind bars. Bonnie and Hillary have enough in common that they strike up a fast friendship and head out one day in search of "fun." However, by the end of the day, their pursuit of happiness has taken them from typically meanspirited teenage pranks, such as dropping pennies onto cars from an overpass, to an abrupt and shocking extreme -- the murder of an elderly woman who has done them no harm. Jane (Leslie Hope), a social worker assigned to work with Bonnie and Hillary, finds it all but impossible to get through to them and is dealing with her own precarious emotional state (which she treats with alcohol), while tabloid journalist John (William R. Moses) tries to wring a juicy, sensational story out of the girls' crime spree. Meanwhile, Bonnie and Hillary wonder out loud about their sudden "celebrity" and who will play them in the inevitable TV movie about their crimes. Alicia Witt and Renee Humphrey both won awards for their performances at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, though the film didn't find a distributor until 1996, after the release of the thematically similar Heavenly Creatures. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
In setting up a narrative structure that positions its central event --here, the senseless murder of an elderly woman by two teenaged girls -- in flashback, Fun offers the possibility to maybe understand why this ghastly crime was committed. After all, Bonnie and Hillary (brilliantly played by Alicia Witt and Renee Humphrey) are, as the film opens, in custody and are being questioned by a reporter (Williams R. Moses) and interviewed by a counselor (Leslie Hope). But the film won't take the easy way out; the reporter is interested in the story mainly for its gruesome details, and the counselor has her own emotional problems, which get in the way of her being an unbiased observer. Ultimately, it may be surmised that Bonnie and Hillary were each a case of damaged goods, but together they fed off their individual senses of betrayal, creating an Us-Against-the-World posture that led to the ultimate act of rejection. The film brilliantly shows the girls immediately testing each other to see how far they can push their sense of rebellion. (There is also an occasional hint of sexual attraction, which is another part of their experimenting.) Heavenly Creatures, in which the private world of two teens is even more imaginatively presented, may have stolen some thunder from Fun, but that shouldn't diminish its achievement as an exploration of adolescent angst and pathology. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Fun is a 1994 independentdrama film starring Alicia Witt and Renée Humphrey, directed by Rafal Zielinski. Both Witt and Humphrey won a Special Jury Recognition for Technical Acting at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. The film centres on the murder of an elderly woman by two mentally unstable girls. It received high critical praise, but failed at the box office; it has since performed well on subsequent video releases.
Plot
The film is told in flashbacks detailing the girls' relationship (in color), and their time in prison (in black and white). Bonnie, aged 14, (Witt) and Hillary, aged 15, (Humphrey) meet at a bus stop in Los Angeles, California and begin a relationship. They stroll around their city, chuck rocks onto a highway from an overpass bridge, run rampant in shopping malls, and play video games.
Their day escalates into an eruption of violence and rage when they brutally stab an elderly woman to death. They then run to a gas station and attempt to wash off the blood from their clothes. After their arrest, they claim that the murder was purely just for "fun". The story moves from the juvenile detention centre where the girls are kept, to the girls on the day of the killing.
