muvies

thirteen

The tale of a thirteen-year old girl who "acts up." We find her suffering from all the venerable symptoms: not just shoplifting, tongue and navel piercing, slutty dressing, anorexia and sass-talking but other classics such as promiscuity (interracial, no less!), jail-baiting, crack-smoking and wrist-cutting-on. These are interspersed with genuine appeals to mom and pop for the kind of attention we're meant to realize is all she needs to be shifted out of reverse (as contrasted with the disingenuity of her bad influence, Evie, who has grown-ups wrapped around her finger with fake-sounding (but true) tales of early abuse).

Why is this girl going so crazy? Most thirteen year olds don't go THAT nuts. And this one's got two sober parents, only one of whom ignores her, and no traumas revealed worse than a stepfather-type who is getting off drugs and is kind of immature, and the aforementioned "bad influence" - evie, who has more legitimate reasons for being whacko - early abuse and nonexistent parents that left her with a crazy lady who lets her drink beer

Emotional and actorly risks were taken, especially by Holly Hunter as the mom who privileged verisimilitude over vanity at every step.

The characters spent a lot of time telling each other what they were feeling, what they wanted in that moment. There was always a new escalation of the depravity the girls were speeding into (never exploitative, btw) and we could watch it through various near observers who felt powerless to change it - mom, dad, brother, teacher and the uncool friends who she dropped and who watched her fade into the black-lipstick crowd.

There were a lot of echoes of "White Oleander" which is about a girl around the same age who's got a definite reason for questioning everything - her mother in jail for murder sabotages her foster-parent relationships and cruelly manipulates her otherwise. Stylistically they both have a quickly edited, allusive, fill-in-blanks feeling and both crash merrily along the road to hell, fading out the film stock as they go to suggest the distance the main character has traveled from her roots. They both take place in a Los Angeles represented as brimming with opportunities for moral corruption. And the two young mother characters in "thirteen" are painted with similar strokes as the foster moms in "White Oleander" - Holly Hunter tries to reach her daughter by acting like a thirteen year-old herself, but then blanches at the turns that must be taken to really fit in, which just drives her further away. And Evie's guardian is too soaked up with despair at her faded ability to pass for a starlet to take any notice of the destroyed young soul in her midst. I guess that doesn't explain why they're like "White Oleander" moms, you'll just have to see both of them now ;). One clear way the two films are alike though is the way we get storylines for both mother and daughter and have a glimpse of the hear-and-now lusts of both, and how they each have to take time-outs to deal with each other.