Opens Fri Aug 29 at Egyptian.
That the teenage years are difficult is not news--it's something we've known for years, thanks to afterschool specials and blunt and terrifying movies like Kids. But stories about teens going out of control tend to inspire more polemic than art, encouraging viewers to identify the problem--the broken home, the oblivious parents, the oversexualized media--and turn the story into a message. What makes Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen more potent is that she offers no such easy outs, but rather points out the vulnerability of the whole structure (family, school, self) that keeps a teen from self-destructing.
Los Angeles teenager Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) doesn't seem like a girl headed for trouble. She's an excellent student, a thoughtful (if heavy-handed) poet, with nice friends. Her mother, Mel (Holly Hunter), is a single parent who makes a slender living styling hair in her kitchen and is no stranger to trouble--perhaps a little distracted, but young-seeming and lively and in touch. She's more, as Evie (Nikki Reed) says, like a cool older sister than a mother, but she's no pushover; Mel sets limits and expects good behavior from her kids. While there's a certain amount of mother-daughter emotional black- mail involved, as there often is between good girls and their mothers, Tracy and Mel are close. But these bonds are too fragile for Tracy's new friendship with Evie, a smooth liar and a sophisticated, vixeny (and per- haps abused) manipulator who proves to be the wedge that makes things fly apart. In what seems like an instant, Tracy is decked out in heavy makeup and hootchy tops, doing drugs and giving blowjobs, and in one awful, unforgettable instant taunting her mother with her promiscuousness. Suddenly, the whole family is in painful thrall to this young girl. The transformation, in which Tracy quickly mortgages all her good-girl qualities in a bid for coolness and adulthood, is very hard to watch indeed--for instance, when Tracy and Evie, faces numb from huffing some substance or another, joyfully sock each other in the jaw. The revelation is that even a good girl has this potential, this meanness, this terrifying need inside her.
There is no one to blame, really, no way to generalize this story into a crusade that will make anyone feel better. I had the opportunity to talk to Catherine Hardwicke about the tendency to turn movies about teenagers into moral lessons, and she said, as far as her story was concerned, perhaps the only failure you could identify was a larger social, even bureaucratic, one. "You have to think for yourself about what the solutions are," she told me. "Are there better ways to support moms and kids? Suppose they decided that Tracy needed counseling. How would Mel have paid for $100-an-hour counseling out of her hairdressing money?"
Moreover, Thirteen is a specific story about specific characters, and part of the film's power is the way that the actors--especially Hunter--turn the characters into complex people rather than arguments. (The super-cool Evie, for instance, is nicer to Tracy's former friends than Tracy is.) Hardwicke cowrote the screenplay with Nikki Reed when Reed was thirteen, because, as she said, "I was moved by what Nikki and her friends were going through, the jittery, crazy, volatile, hormonal thing. She would get up at 4:30 in the morning and spend two hours on her hair and makeup, doing her makeup with a fashion magazine open in front of her, and she'd do exactly what she saw on the page. And I realized that we tell her exactly what to do, and she was doing it."
Whether anyone is saved in this movie is left ambiguous, thank goodness; if a rescuer had ridden in and turned everything right again, Thirteen would have turned into a cautionary tale. But Hardwicke also understands the rabbit hole children drop through; in school Tracy fails a project in which the students create a biosphere--a closed, working ecosystem in which they have to delineate everything they need to survive. What, in the end, is a more harrowing social experiment than being a teenager?
