There is a menace to Catherine Hardwickes THIRTEEN. The reason is that the fall from grace and sobriety experienced by its lead character, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), is one that she eagerly embraces with all the reckless passion and aching desperation that only a thirteen-year-old can harbor. Hardwicke, setting her story squarely in the real world, encapsulates the tightrope that girls who are barely pubescent negotiate on their way to adulthood and, with luck, maturity, when one wrong friend, one misplaced priority, can derail an entire life.
Tracy, thirteen and suffering all the pangs and angst that are inherent to that stage of life, has had less than an ideal childhood. Shes burdened with a broken home, an absent father, and a mother (Holly Hunter in another stunning performance) who, though loving, is barely more than a child herself despite her years. All in all, not so very different from what many kids deal with. On the first day of the seventh grade, Tracy realizes that things have changed, and not just her body or the bodies of the other girls who are attracting the attention of every male in sight. Between the hormones that have kicked in and the problems at home, grades, friends, in fact everything that mattered disappears in one random put-down from the coolest and baddest girl in school (co-writer Nikki Reed). Out go the stuffed animals, replaced with petty theft, casual sex, and drugs that are ingested to at first heighten the senses and then to dull them.
Its the desperation that Wood has nailed with Tracy. Her performance is precise, seemingly unstudied and gut-wrenching. In her hip-swinging swagger, there is still the little girl desperate for attention, desperate to fit in, and desperate to know all of lifes answers right now. Hunter as her mother has the saddest and the scariest part, that of a woman with her own desperations, a woman with a big heart and the best intentions, but one with little clue as to how mothering works. In a moment that breaks your heart, she looks at the creature her daughter has become and tells her That isnt how I raised you, oblivious to the fact that between the coke-head boyfriends and the carelessness with both boundaries and feelings, that this is, in fact, exactly the way she has raised her daughter. Hardwicke supports the action with careful visuals, the camera moves are as jangled as the nerves of the characters on screen, colors bleach when things cut too close to the bone. The script, co-authored by Hardwicke and then 13-year-old Reed and loosely based on her Reeds experiences, has an unmistakable aura of authenticity that is unrelenting as it captures poignancy of Tracys blithe abandonment of the last vestiges of her innocence while those who care for and about her are paralyzed into inaction at the changes they see.
THIRTEEN doesnt pretend to have all the answers. That would be presumptuous and pat. Instead, it displays compassion for its characters, even the worst of them, allowing them to keep their humanity while not excusing their sins. Its a point of reference that involves us intimately and moves us deeply.
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