So, I finally saw Thirteen. Shit, Nikki Reed is one charismatic con artist. If you're looking to lose a few hours growing increasingly despondent about the state of today's youth, I advise you to read the comment threads on the IMDb listing, too. Lotsa young Canucks weighing in, which is odd.
I don't think there were any kiddies in the theatre when I saw it tonight. With or without an earnest parent. It had been demoted to the tiniest screen in this second-run house, and the audience, such as it was, was nearly all post-collegiate women with the occasional sensitive guy harboring hopes of action, maybe. Or at least points toward action someday. But I'm being unfair.
Before I go any further, I'd like to call a moratorium on the following tropes in girl-bildsdungroman movies: scenes of cutting, actual or implied eating disorders, shoplifting, overwhelmed single moms, looks of panic/dead-inside eyes during the inevitable squeamish-making sex-too-young scene. We get it, okay? Girls are in trouble and we have no idea what it's like, so the filmmaker will show us in excruciating detail. Hey, if I want to catch up with the plight of the girlies, can I just check out Lauren Greenfield's photos instead?
With that out of the way, I can say that I liked this quite-similar movie a lot more than Blue Car. Even with the grainy DV cinematography, Thirteen was a better-acted, better-looking movie. Also, it was strangely refreshing to have the corrrupting influence be another girl, and not some predatory guy.
And, of course, there's Holly Hunter, no bigger than a girl herself, unafraid of showing her wrinkles or her white knuckles as she tries to hold on to her sobriety and hold her family together while her adolescent daughter Tracy's centrifugal force threatens to spin it apart. There's so much to say about her performance, and about how richly written her character is. But what I keep thinking about is her dirty fingernails, stained from all the color jobs she gives women in her home to earn a little extra money.
Evan Rachel Wood is a wonder as Tracy, the good girl beguiled by evil Evie to go bad. [Plus, she looks like my friend Buick.] And that's the thing that this movie does better than others of its ilk: It gets, and shows, that no matter how sexually or pharmaceutically precocious the seduced [and abandoned] good girl Tracy ultimately becomes, she is far more thrilled [to the point of busting an adorable move] to get Evie's digits at the beginning of the movie than she is by kissing any boy once she is rendered cool by association. Everything she does--shoplifting, getting piercings, getting high--is because she is in love with Evie. They are not lesbians: The--woo woo--kissing scene is a great example of girls giving their hormones a test run in a safe way, and not any Ur-lesbian moment. Tracy is in love with who Evie gives her permission to be.
Evie is, however, a manipulative, needy, emotional vampire, and while she's set up to be the bad guy, she's ultimately the one for whom your heart aches. Tracy's mom may not be perfect, but she's there, and she won't be pushed away. Evie recognizes this and tries to worm her way into something that's missing in her own life. When she's rejected, she lashes out and tries to destroy what she can't have. It's a great performance.
I'll be the first to admit it: Adolescent girls scare the shit out of me. I remember enough of how it felt --without having to dress like a hootchie mama, too--that I can't begin to understand how angry they must be.
Good thing the majority of them are most likely not Times readers. This piece from Sunday's magazine sure doesn't make surviving adolescence intact feel like more than a fake-out.
Aside: The closing credits of Thirteen rolled to Liz Phair's "Explain it to me," from Exile in Guyville. It was just the right exhausted valedictory, but, if anything, it depressed me even more as I left the theatre. Why? It reminded me of that smart-mouthed Midwesterner who was such a revelation in 1993. I didn't buy her bravado for a second; I recognized it. Now, she too seems to have fallen under Evie's [and Britney's. And Avril's] spell, chucking it all to get high on what it feels like to be popular. I heard her new single in a car dealership today, nestled between "What if God was one of us?" "I Try," and "Who will sa-ayy-ave your soul?"
Good question. I'm guessing the answer is not the Matrix, unless you're Neo.
