| Thirteen\r\nStarring Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, and Holly Hunter. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Written by Catherine Hardwicke and Nikki Reed. Rated R. |
|
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
|
|
|
|
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
|
|
What a Girl Wants
Thirteen is bad luck, but Evan Rachel Wood is so good.
By KRISTIAN LIN
Lots of movies play like they were written by 14-year-old girls. Here’s a movie that actually was written by one, namely Nikki Reed. She was a girl going through a bad patch when Catherine Hardwicke, a film production designer who had dated Reed’s father, offered to help her write her way out of it. Their collaboration turned into a script, and then into Thirteen, directed by Hardwicke and co-starring Reed. Various movie critics have praised this film as a fundamentally more truthful portrayal of contemporary girlhood than, say, The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Well, it isn’t. It certainly shows another side of things, but it’s just as limited in its viewpoint (not to mention its storytelling). Even though it features an Oscar-worthy lead performance, it’s depressing to watch, much more because of its limitations than its subject matter.
That subject is a seething ball of resentment named Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), growing up in an unfashionable part of southern California. She has quite a bit to resent, like her clueless jerk of a dad (D.W. Moffett) who abandoned the family, her mom (Holly Hunter) who can barely keep herself together, and the boyfriend (Jeremy Sisto) that her mom picked up in rehab. So when she’s encouraged to act out by Evie Zamora (Reed), her new best friend and one of the cool girls at school, Tracy’s only too receptive. She does basically everything you don’t want your 13-year-old daughter to do, in an all-out effort to inflict maximum pain on everyone around her. Her personality’s enough to peel the paint off the walls and kill all the plants. When the boyfriend tries to discipline her, she just looks him in the eye, calls him a cokehead, and walks away while audibly muttering “You’re such a goddamn loser.”
In short order and under Evie’s guidance, Tracy takes up smoking, drinking, shoplifting, self-mutilation, anorexia, getting high, and having sex with black guys. No wonder she’s failing seventh grade. Just think, any one of these activities would qualify as a crisis, and she’s got them all on her schedule. (Even in far subtler movies such as Traffic and Requiem for a Dream, white girls in trouble always have sex with black guys. Not Latino guys. Not Asian guys. Not black women. Yeah, this film is racist, playing on a white audience’s horror of this specific kind of interracial sex, but that’s a minor problem compared to the movie’s other shortcomings.)
I’m being snarky, but I have a good reason — I don’t believe this story, at least not the way this movie presents it. The filmmakers claim that this is based on Reed’s life, and I’m sure she really lived through some of this story, just as I’m sure that there really are 13-year-old girls who are as bad off as Tracy. But I’m also sure that Reed, being a kid and having a kid’s instinctive knack for saying what grown-ups want to hear, did some serious embellishing when it came to recounting her own bad-girl antics. Which is fine, this being fiction. However, this movie’s too eager to shock us, and it winds up being alarmist rather than cautionary.
The movie plays like a litany of teen (or, in this case, pre-teen) misbehavior, mostly because it’s so unstructured. The lack of structure isn’t necessarily a bad thing — this girl’s life isn’t going to assume the dimensions of a three-act drama, and the movie assumes a veneer of realism by not pretending that it does. The problem, though, is that the great majority of the scenes have exactly the same shape and tone as the others. That’s monotonous. Everything that happens is given the same amount of dramatic weight, which all too often tips the film into the territory of hysteria. Tracy’s mom is just as upset over Tracy’s pierced tongue as she is about the shoplifting and drugs. Come on. Hardwicke should have brought an adult’s perspective to this material, but she fails mightily.
The way Tracy and Evie’s friendship blossoms and goes bad like a love affair is fairly well done. So is the reality of the lower-middle-class home depicted here. Still, the movie would be unredeemable if Evan Rachel Wood didn’t throw herself so fearlessly into the part. A slim actress with an attractive face and voice, she nevertheless turns in a feral performance here. Everything about Tracy is charged with electricity — her intelligence, her girlish enthusiasm at first gaining access to Evie’s circle, her rage at the flawed people around her, and her discovery of her own destructive power. Holly Hunter does fine work as Tracy’s helpless mom, and yet this great actress gets almost obliterated by the force of the 15-year-old star’s magnetism. The cathartic final scene on a kitchen floor is a truly scary piece of work. Evan Rachel Wood gives the movie an authenticity that it doesn’t deserve, and because of her, Thirteen is a rare creature — a bad movie that you need to see anyway.
Email this Article...
