Release Date: August 20, 2003
Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto, Brady Corbet, Deborah Kara Unger
Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
Written by: Catherine Hardwicke, Nikki Reed
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (drug use, self destructive violence, language, and sexuality -- all involving young teens)
There was a part of Thirteen where I was reminded of the Disney remake of Freaky Friday starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In both movies, there is a scene where a mother discovers that her teenage daughter has had her navel pierced without parental consent. The bubble gum-sweet Friday treats it as an inconsequential joke (kids these days); in the gritty and sometimes painful Thirteen, however, the moment of discovery comes in a string of startling realizations. The daughter, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), proceeds to tell her mother that she has not only had her belly button pierced, but her tongue as well; that she is not wearing any underwear; and that she has discovered, in quick succession, sex, drugs, and petty crime.
The comparison is relevant if only because it is a striking example of how Thirteen lands its punches in a shocking grand tour of the social capital of a teenage girl's world -- clothes, makeup, cell phones, boys, and a carefully constructed careless cool. Tracy's final stand is a decidedly non-Disney moment in a decidedly non-Disney movie.
It is even more eye-opening because Tracy is, as the title suggests, a mere 13 years old; the teenage girl played by Lohan in Freaky Friday is three years Tracy's senior. And it is depressing, because it is easy to see that everything that happens to Tracy happens because she is at the center of a whirlwind of human depravity, despite that when the movie begins, she is wholesome enough to star in a Disney movie. Then, she is blonde and healthy and colorful, tactful enough to put up with her eccentric and inattentive mom, Mel (Holly Hunter), who runs a hair salon out of their home so she can pay the mounting bills.
She is, in most respects, a typical 13-year-old girl, but Tracy soon discovers that this is hardly acceptable in her suburban Los Angeles middle school -- especially after she meets Evie (Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the movie with director Catherine Hardwicke). If the movie is about social capital, then Evie is a loan shark, quickly advancing Tracy huge sums. Tracy earns Evie's esteem by stealing a woman's purse on Melrose Avenue, and Evie soon takes the impressionable young girl under her wing. "Tracy was playing with Barbies before she met Evie," cries Mel later in the movie, but that is most certainly not the case afterward, as, under Evie's guidance, Tracy begins dealing drugs, shoplifting, dressing explicitly, fooling around with older guys, and, in short, getting into the deep end of life without so much as a swimming lesson.
Tracy's quick and startling transformation from a more or less typical teenager to an empty ghost of a person, plumbing the depths of the human condition with a frightening lack of remorse (a veritable public service announcement for the benefits of good parenting), reminded me of the excellent 2000 movie Requiem for a Dream. In that movie, too, characters that are essentially good at the story's beginning take a sharp turn for the worse, and end up paying for it with their lives, or at least their souls. But it is more unsettling to watch Tracy go from struggling to stay afloat in a broken home to sinking quickly at the whim of the manipulative Evie. Almost every viewer who watches this movie is likely older than Tracy, and will both pity her and yearn to reach through the movie screen and lend her a hand.
A number of characters in the movie try to lend her a hand, although none with any sincerity. The aptly named Evie (in a Biblical sense), too, masks her temptations by assuring both Tracy and Mel that she is there to help, but this is hardly the case. In one scene, Evie discovers what the viewer already knows: that Tracy has suicidal tendencies, and has come close to slitting her wrists several times. "I love you, Tracy," Evie coos, holding Tracy in an effort to console her. But we can see in her eyes that she is merely storing this information, trying to decide when best to use it to her own advantage.
Likewise, Tracy's mom, Mel, is unsure of how to handle her daughter's new lifestyle and best friend. She is, like most parents would be, grudgingly approving; before she knows it, however, Tracy's life has gotten out of hand and Mel doesn't have the leverage to change things. In the movie's world of social capital, Mel is broke; a number of scenes are designed to show just why many teenage girls are embarrassed of their mothers -- because they do not traffic in boys and clothes and cool, or in other words, what matters most. After Tracy and Evie have put on loads of makeup and revealing clothes, for example, Mel attempts to insert herself into the glamour by showing off her freshly-painted toenails; Tracy's look of revulsion is withering.
Tracy's dad is never around; her brother Mason (Brady Corbet) is concerned but smokes pot, a contradiction in morals so superficial that it is painful to see Tracy reject him; and her mom's new beau, a former cokehead named Brady (Jeremy Sisto), is probably the wisest character in the movie. But Tracy apparently blames anyone and everyone for her parents' separation, and in desperation she often levels her sights on Brady.
Tracy is, despite her rather direct downward spiral, a very complex character, filled with emotion and nuance and intricacy. Evan Rachel Wood carries the movie with her performance, depicting a very realistic range of confusion, curiosity, fear, sarcasm, and anger, and her final scene with Holly Hunter is the movie's most affecting and powerful moment. Hunter, too, seems genuinely afraid during the movie's second and third acts, when Mel begins to realize that she has lost any influence whatsoever on her daughter. And Jeremy Sisto and Deborah Kara Unger turn in quality performances in supporting roles.
The other major performer, though, is Nikki Reed, whose contributions to the script were reportedly based on her own experiences growing up in Los Angeles. She was, at the time of filming, 13 years old, and she is positively evil as Evie. Her performance is so malicious that it exposes the movie's only flaw: it's never clear why Evie is so thoroughly intent on ruining Tracy's life, for she is clearly conscious of what she is doing. The script hints at a history of abuse, but by the end of the movie Evie has become such a paragon of lies and cruelty that the audience is never sure what to believe.
In fact, if not for the movie's raw, unrelenting quality, it might be hard to believe that any of this is happening, so complete and saddening is the destruction of Tracy's life. Occasionally, the material even seems to disturb director Hardwicke, for she refuses to show the audience certain things (the complete nature of Tracy's suicide attempts, or anything explicit involving teenagers and sex). But Hardwicke is not the first to discover that teenagers left to their own devices can generate dramatically disturbing material; the contemporary Brazilian film City of God was quite adept at that. It's not nearly so easy to dismiss Thirteen, though, because though the setting is Los Angeles, there is the feeling that any of this could be happening right around the corner.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)