Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed and Kip Pardue
Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
It has been highly publicized in movie circles that Evan Rachel Wood, the young star of Thirteen, based much of the film's script on actual events in her life. Because of the intimate involvement of a teenager in the filmmaking process, I went into Thirteen with expectations to find insight into the ups and down of the teenage existence that I've never seen explored in a film before. But much to my dismay, insight was nowhere to be found in this dreadful film.
Thirteen is the story of Tracy (Wood), one of the best students in her inner-city high school. One day during lunch, a sarcastic comment is made about her socks, and it hurts her feelings. The afternoon she throws away all of her stuffed animals and Barbie dolls and goes out and buys a whole new wardrobe. The next day her flashy new clothes catches the attention of Evie (Reed), the "hottest girl in school," and the girl every one of her female peers aspires to imitate. Hoping to impress Evie, Tracy begins to steal money, do drugs, and play around with the popular boys she suddenly has access to. Before she realizes it, her life is spinning wildly out of control, and there's no way for her to stop.
By trying to be ultra-realistic, Thirteen becomes completely unrealistic and it ends up ignorning many of the issues most teenagers deal with today. The audience is continually subjected to graphic scenes of drug use and self-mutilation that suggests director Hardwicke was more interested in disturbing the audience than actually developing her characters and exploring Tracy's relationships with her family and friends and she begins to alienate herself from reality.
So much potential is wasted in this film. The performances are uniformaly good (particulary Hunter as Tracy's well-meaning but clueless mom), and the subject matter offers unlimited possibilities. But Thirteen seems like a glance into the diary of an over-dramatic junior high student and the whole films comes off as seeming, well, like a it was written by a thirteen year old (which it was).
There have been many films over the years depicting the lives of teenagers and the perils of growing up, but in the case of Thirteen, shock value is being confused with depth and truth, revealing a disturbing but ultimately empty film.
-Written for The Point Weekly, September 15, 2003 issue
