If memories of the adolescent social scene make you uncomfortable (check), if you remember your friends as backstabbing, fashion-obsessed, nasty bitches (check), and if seeing real teen trauma go untreated brings back too many flashbacks (check), well, then, you can skip this one. Oh, unless in your real life there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Well, I guess if you have internet access and you read my blog, there was probably light somewhere at the end of your tunnel, but whatev.
The movie opened to the typical “I’m a nerdy middle-school girl jealous of the in-crowd” and quickly montage-d into “this is what it’s like to *finally* be accepted!!!” complete with surrealist lighting and spinning camera angles. Cliché! But, wait, is that Holly Hunter? It is! What’s she doing here?
Chicken, egg, I don’t know. Holly Hunter made her appearance as the mom right around where the movie started to get less hackneyed and more believable. But! Even our quirky, indie-film doyenne couldn’t save this movie from itself.
For its genre, teen-angst-a-thon, Thirteen was actually pretty decent. It felt sort of documentary in that there wasn’t a whole lot of moralizing or interpreting events, rather, they just let teenagers be teenagers and do the things terrible teenagers do—hurt and be hurt by each other. There’s the peer pressure to shop lift, which mounts to peer pressure for body piercing, which escalates to peer pressure to make out with guys, which then turns into peer pressure to escalate drug abuse. Frankly, it’s just “kid-gone-wrong” stuff.
Until we learn Tracy is a cutter. We learn that Tracy’s home life isn’t as All-American as it seemed in those opening shots, and that one reason she’s so susceptible to let pressure escalate her self-destructive behavior is that she’s already engaging in out-there self-harm. This kid isn’t just acting out the way an adolescent does, this kid has serious problems.
The conclusion was so real it hurt, though. In the end, once Tracy has been kicked out of the cool girls’ club, her erstwhile best friend, Evie, rats on everything Tracy ever did. It begins when Evie spreads lies about Tracy to get her shunned at school. It worked. Then Evie had her guardian stage a disingenuine intervention with Tracy and her mom, pouring out onto the coffee table all the secret stashed cigarettes, alcohol, and pills. Coup de grace? Evie wrenches up Tracy’s sleeves to reveal the long rows of cutting marks from her wrist to elbow.
After that dramatic catharsis, Tracy and her mom fight, but Holly Hunter has learned that Tracy needs love more than she ever realized. Mom grips Tracy and says, “I’m never letting go again.” They fall asleep in Tracy’s bed, wrapped in each other’s arms. It was an unexpectedly genuine moment in a movie that alternated between real youth drama and clichés.
All of this leaves me wondering who the prospective audience was supposed to be? You know I’ll watch any crap, but there were many times I wanted to turn this off because it was so boring. And obvious. And tedious. The zinger? It was rated R. Seeing it, I know *why* it was rated R, but the movie fell into a teen no-man’s land in between the grit-free PG-13 and the gritty R. Audiences most likely to be affected by it are in that no-man’s land too, I guess.
If you really want to see Holly Hunter do good angst, watch Laurel Canyon. "Thirteen" is only worth watching if you had a clinical problem as a kid and want to feel vicariously vindicated through Holly Hunter’s love.
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1 comment:
Yeah, not my piece of cake, either. I don't remember disliking it as much as you did, though. Wish my mom was Holly Hunter!
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