Thirteen: Movie & DVD Review

(Originally published 2003)

Oh, to be 13 again. Wasn’t it great? Certainly it was for some, but those people either were aliens or they won the lottery of life. For the rest of us, the shift into adolescence could be trying, to say the least.

With your hormones raging, the peer pressure building, your body changing, the cliques forming--and you stuck in the middle of it--somehow it seemed as if at 13, everyone had you figured out but you.

Eventually, as an adult, you see your old schoolmates for what they were. But when you’re living it, as 13-year-old Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) is in Catherine Hardwicke’s bleak drama “Thirteen,” what you sometimes feel is the shame of not belonging, the humiliation that accompanies being shunned, the embarrassment of being you.

To her core, Tracy feels all of that, so much so that she’s willing to do anything to break free from it. In the process, she loses who she was, a sweet, studious girl from a broken home whose undoing was to meet and befriend the wrong person.

The film, which Hardwicke co-wrote with her co-star, Nikki Reed, literally begins with a slap across the face.

Tracy and her best friend, Evie (Reed), are sitting on Tracy’s bed, huffing fumes from an aerosol can, so stoned out of their minds that they can’t feel themselves, which is the point. In a chorus of “Hit me harders!,” they swing freely at each other, bludgeoning their faces with their closed fists in a cloud of escalating laughter.

From here, the movie cuts to an extended flashback, chronicling how Tracy came to know Evie, the hottest, most popular girl at Tracy’s school.

Soon, in spite of her single mother’s (Holly Hunter) guarded consent, Tracy is dressing just as provocatively as Evie, who takes Tracy under her wing and develops the sort of relationship every parent dreads.

Indeed Evie, whose own home life also is no prize, encourages Tracy to try drugs, to smoke and to drink, to pierce her tongue and navel, to steal, and to participate, among other things, in group sex. Soon, Tracy’s already shaky family is falling apart because of it, with the increasingly lost and confused seventh grader slowly self-destructing as a result.

Beyond the performances, which are raw and convincing, with Wood and Hunter both deservedly scoring Golden Globe nominations, what’s startling and dead-on about “Thirteen” is how quickly and easily Tracy assumes the role of budding sex goddess, how her rage and isolation help to morph her into her idea of an adult, and the dangerous yet tantalizing freedom she finds in defying her mother while embracing her surging sexuality.

Of course, there are consequences to such freedom, and Hardwicke unleashes them upon Tracy with the skill of a director who has unusually sharp insights into her situation, which of course she does. In real life, Nikki Reed is Hardwicke’s step-daughter, on whose life “Thirteen” is based. If the film feels exploitative because of that, the truth and power Hardwicke mines nevertheless serves as the defining balance.

Grade: A-