Two girls sit on a bed getting high until one can no longer feel her face. She asks the other to hit her. Slam! “Again, harder,” she says. They exchange blows until one girl, the blonde, is knocked to the floor, banging her head against a chair. You, as an audience member might as well be the one receiving the punches; the effect is the same. The scene fades out and we read, “4 months earlier…”
Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood of TV’s “Once and Again”) is a 13-year old searching for her cool. Her bedroom walls are plastered with advertisements, slogans and sultry models. She is pigtails and science projects, but not for long. Cool kid Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed) soon reveals to Tracy that being cool in a California junior high school has its cost.
Reed co-wrote the biting screenplay with director Catherine Hardwicke, a former girlfriend of Reed’s divorced dad, when she was 13, basing it on her real-life experiences. When she was 14, she knocked out the role of Evie with ease. The way her character dismisses adults in every context could only have been pulled off by a pre-pubescent teen.
Holly Hunter, as Tracy’s single mother, Melanie, delivers a painfully realistic portrayal of a would-be role model coping with too much: too many house-crashing friends; too many appointments (her hairdressing career takes place entirely in her living room); too many distractions keeping her from understanding her daughter’s downward spiral.
Hunter’s free-spirit California-neo-hipster-past-her-prime character complements Wood’s graceful angst as they shop out of vans and gradually become despondent. In one scene Hunter rips up the kitchen floor, lamenting how cheap it is, anguished that her child could have changed so much for the worse.
After Evie and Tracy bond through a shoplifting and robbery, the girls become inseparable. Evie practically moves into Melanie’s house, and a carnival ride of nonstop drugs, alcohol, revealing clothing, body piercings and sexual experimentation soon follows. Kip Pardue plays the lifeguard neighbor who (after correctly labeling the girls “jailbait”) is nearly seduced into a threesome with Tracy and Evie.
Hardwicke (who won best director at Sundance 2003) captures the horror and pressures of these young girls’ lives with distinct clarity. Her roaming camera and blue-grain film stock present the grit of growing up at too young an age. Color motifs and reoccurring media images (look for repeated billboards, commercials and magazine ads) emphasize the social pressures young women face every day. The overarching “beauty is everything” theme is eventually pleasantly derailed, superimposing love and family over other more materialistic American ideals. Intricate shot compositions only add to the bewilderment the fast-paced script instills in the audience.
“Thirteen” is not meant for the age group it chronicles. Its sophistication comes across best when the teens are at their worst. After ditching her mom at the movies, Tracy, now outfitted with colorful hair extensions and a highly visible thong, is hit on by her brother and his friends before they realize who she is. But hilarity is distant as “Thirteen’s” media-saturated youngsters rip across the screen in a downhill battle against uncoolness and the unbearable possibility of being social outcasts.
