Thirteen (2003)

Thirteen

Matinee with Snacks

Production designer-turned-director Catherine Hardwicke cowrote the screenplay to Thirteen with Nikki Reed, who was 13 at the time the film was written (it was shot a year later). Nikki plays school popular bad-girl and mentor and eventual best friend to Evan Rachel Wood. Together they portray the stories that Reed had told Hardwicke about. "I started off by wanting to know what girls really talk about," comments Hardwicke on Fox Searchlight's webpage, "and when Nikki started opening up it became a lot more interesting, and daring, than any teen plot we could imagine."

To watch this film, knowing it comes from true tales of modern tweens, may be the closest thing to parental panic an unchilded person can have. Wood and Reed are impossibly beautiful and confident, and daring in ways I know no one I knew even dreamed adults could be, never mind ourselves. It may seem to smack of sensationalism, but if you flip through your cable channels a little while, it suddenly doesn't seem so improbable. As the girls descend more and more deeply into realms of the irreparable, you in the dark twist and turn in your seats, in terror for them and also in empathy for Wood's character. She was your regular junior high girl who was sucked into a Los Angeleno underworld of dangerous behavior and oversexualizedbarely pubescent "cool kids."

Most of my readers can recall when they themselves were 13 - it is a key year, the first "teen" year, when puberty is really starting to literally separate the men from the boys, when we become aware of our sexual identities as well as our own real separate selves. Many kids are angry, or experiencing new levels of peer pressure and angst, which they don't yet have the tools to process. They wish to be separated from their parents and accepted by someone, anyone - and if that anyone is perceived as cooler or better, no price is too high to please them. The mainstreaming of formerly fringe forms of self expression (piercing and tattoos, for example, permanent expressions as compared to haircuts or clothing choices) and the full time accessibility of more mature-themed information thanks to the information age gives these kids a huge palette to paint themselves from. We know what it was like to try and shape ourselves to external expectations (or to rebel against them and absorb the consequences) of the cruelest years of life, and we empathize even as we cannot believe it is really like this now.

This same cringing empathy is extended, in a different way, to Wood's single mom, played fiercely by Holly Hunter. Hunter and Wood have a natural familial chemistry together, and Wood's beautifully performed transgressions from "goodness" into "badness" feel more of a betrayal of who she is/was for seeing the very real effect on Hunter. As a single mom with a girl who has had to do some growing up due to the single parent household, Hunter must always be redefining her relationship to Wood, which complicates the journey for both. We can imagine the burden and the helplessness, and also how easy it would be to not see all that is happening, thanks to Hunter's fantastic performance.

Thirteen, as a title, reminds you always that this is how old they are, they are only thirteen, thirteen! You are constantly forced to renegotiate your perspective because young people are so dangerous and sexualized in the media these days one doesn't notice anything wrong, per se, because these girls must be 21, from a Girls Gone Wild video, right? No! They are thirteen! It will stick with you for a good long while after you see it.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2003-2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource

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X-RT-RatingText: 4.5/5