August 28-September 3, 2003

movies

New Kids on the Block

Trunk and disorderly: Evan Rachel Wood (center) and Nikki Reed (right) try to escape their problems, and Holly Hunter.

Thirteen is an often deft presentation of familiar teen traumas.

by Cindy Fuchs

Thirteen begins in mid-crisis. Two 13-year-old girls sit on a bed and suck up a can of Dust-Off. Shot in a series of close-ups, they lapse into a sort of delirium. "I canít feel anything," giggles the blond one, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood). The dark one, temptress Evie (Nikki Reed), claims to hear a sound in her head: "Thatís your brain cells popping!" squeals Tracy, just before they start hitting each other, just to feel something. Theyíre both surprised when they knock each other off the bed, raising welts and drawing blood. They laugh again.

Cutting back from this girl-bonding commotion to four months earlier, Thirteen traces how Tracy and Evie came to this unpretty place. While the route is simplified for popular consumption, the story is compelling, even urgent, particularly if you know any 13-year-olds who are feeling alienated, angry or self-destructive. Pale and willowy, Tracy starts out as an apparent "good girl." Living with her single mom, Melanie (Holly Hunter), and slightly older brother, Mason (Brady Corbet), in a low-rent section of Los Angeles, she does her homework, doesn't make waves and looks after her mom, a recovering addict and at-home hairdresser who tends to lose track of her hair gel during appointments.

Beneath her seeming self-possession, however, Tracy's in trouble. She resents dad's absence and mom's chaotic life and on-again-off-again boyfriend, Brady (Jeremy Sisto), also a recovering addict. In search of some sense of order, she's been cutting herself, keeping scissors and a bloody rag hidden in the bathroom for late-night self-damage sessions. Heading back to school, new to seventh grade, Tracy's hardly noticed. But, like everyone else, she takes definite notice of classmate Evie -- in perfect makeup, tight top, low-cut jeans and navel ring -- and resolves that day to get with the cool girls. Initially scornful of this corny girl in cutesy blue socks ("Who let her out of the cabbage patch?"), Evie relents when Tracy steals a wallet full of cash, offering it up as a kind of dowry. From here, Tracy reels into a torrent of first times -- getting her tongue and navel pierced, shoplifting on Melrose, drinking, tripping on acid. And, of course, experimenting with sex -- with boys and with Evie, high and sober. As the girls have picked up from every cultural sign around them, sex is a route to adulthood, but it's also a kind of ordeal, a test of their very young mettle.

The girls' almost instantly co-dependent friendship leads to inevitable tension and competition, especially when Evie seeks Mel's attention, telling stories about abuses at home. While it's never quite clear how Evie has been abused or by whom, her situation is plainly raucous; she lives with Brooke (Deborah Kara Unger), who, much like the girls, pursues mass-marketed happiness, imagining that wearing girlie outfits, sleeping with younger men or getting plastic surgery will make her happy. The film suggests that she's not, but only from a distance, as the girls perceive her, through windows and doorways.

Co-written by Reed and director Catherine Hardwicke, and inspired by Reed's experiences (as she's been telling the many interviewers pleased to see she's not only survived, but also graduated to poised movie stardom at age 15), Thirteen is both harrowing and moralistic. In this, the film recalls Larry Clark's Kids, exposing bad behavior in handheld Super 16 imagery (here by the endlessly resourceful Elliot Davis of Get on the Bus fame) that hovers between reportage and sensationalism. Also like Kids, it comes with a rating that doesn't allow 13-year-olds to see it; Hardwicke advocates that kids see it with adults with whom they can discuss it together.

Such discussion might be especially helpful when it comes to Thirteen's presentation of Tracy and Evie's sexual experimentations, which allow for a reading that raises race-mixing anxieties, as they pursue black and Hispanic boys who impress girls by rapping and beatboxing. Evie slips out the window to "party" with some kid in the park, leaving Tracy to wonder what she's missing. When Tracy does attract the attention of Javi (Charles Duckworth), the girls work their simultaneous make-out and blowjob sessions in mirror fashion, Tracy modeling her actions after Evie's. (That Evie later pursues Javi herself only underlines her own insecurity, which emerges as malice.)

But if the film shifts awkwardly from overstatement to ambiguity with regard to Evie and Tracy, it renders Tracy and Mel's relationship with affecting detail. In part, this has to do with Wood and Hunter, who are frequently stunning (Mel's assault on her own kitchen floor tiles is just one remarkable moment), but it's also a function of the attention paid to both characters' ongoing efforts to deal with more or less familiar traumas.

So daily are these struggles that even the house illustrates their simultaneous lack of boundaries and inability to communicate: Tracy's room has windows looking out on the living room, where she watches Mel make out with Brady. Messy, loving and mutually frustrating, they lurch from moment to moment, desperate to connect. It's the sort of crisis that can't be resolved in one movie, but Thirteen does well to expose its nuances.

Thirteen

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke A Fox Searchlight release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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