BEFORE: Happy belated birthday to Evan Rachel Wood, born on September 7, 1987. That was Labor Day this year, and yesterday's film fit in more with that theme, but since I started watching this one before midnight on 9/7, I'm counting that as a birthday salute.
This is also BACK TO SCHOOL film #2, following "The New Guy", which was a film about a teen boy acting tough to survive high school - for the sake of balance, this one's about a teen girl acting out to make friends in high school. One's a comedy and one's a drama, but still, things are still sort of happening in twos like they did in August. I've had "Thirteen" on my list for quite some time, for a while I was going to link to it via "Swing Shift", but that film then got moved into the romance chain in February last year. Then I tried to link to it via the animated film "Ferdinand", via Jeremy Sisto, but then that film got dropped last year and re-scheduled into 2020. All of this didn't help me get to "Thirteen", so this is at least the third attempt to schedule it, as it didn't fit into last September's schedule either. Finally, FINALLY I'm crossing off this film today, no matter what.
Holly Hunter carries over from "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her".
AFTER: I think the first time I saw Evan Rachel Wood in a movie, she was just nine or ten, the film was "Digging to China", which I think I saw at the Sundance Festival in January 1998. Then I don't think I saw her in anything else until I watched "Across the Universe" in 2007, that movie that made actors sing a bunch of Beatles songs, forcing a very convoluted plot. Sometime after that I watched "The Missing", which she filmed at the age of 15 or 16, and then "The Wrestler", which came five years after that - and I didn't really make the connection back to that 10-year old girl from "Digging to China". So by the time she became super-famous for starring in the reboot series "Westworld" in 2016, I was still saying, "Who the hell is that?" even though I'd seen her in a respectable number of films, but somehow she was always under my radar.
Clearly I missed something somewhere, maybe it was those awkward teen years - but after watching "Thirteen", maybe I got the better part of that deal. I should have quit while I was ahead, because there are parts of this film that were just painful for me to watch, and I'm not just talking about the tongue-piercing scene. Sure, everybody goes through some kind of rebellious phase when they're a teenager, who doesn't want to misbehave for fun every now and again. It's become practically a rite of passage for teens to drink a little, smoke a little, try all sorts of little chemical experiments and also sexual ones, part of becoming an adult is to figure out where one's own limits are. But this film really piles them on to demonstrate an extreme example of a teen girl acting up - or is it acting out?
Which really interferes with me being able to label this as a "back to school" film - OK, sure, there are some scenes set in a high school classroom, but there's very little attention paid here to doing homework, taking exams, or even taking notes. Last week I pointed out after watching "The Wilde Wedding" that if that film had depicted a wedding in which everyone showed up, behaved and everything went smoothly, that would have been very boring indeed. By the same token, I'll admit that if Tracy just went to class, completed all of her assignments, followed all the rules and generally tried her best to fit in but also not draw too much attention to herself, yeah, that's also a very boring film. Some things HAVE to go wrong in her life, or she's got to get into some kind of trouble along the way, or her teenage experience would be, well, just as boring as mine was - and you don't see anybody making any films about my so-called high school life.
Instead she's an extreme example of bad behavior, in order to become friends with Evie, the popular girl, she starts shoplifting and also stealing a purse or two, then once they're besties there are drugs smoked, snorted and inhaled, from there it's on to kissing guys, making out with guys (separately and then together) and then making out with each other. In a few weeks Evie's been spending so much time at Tracy's house that they're practically roommates, and Evie keeps selling sob stories about how her mother's not really her mother but just her legal guardian, and her mom's boyfriend likes to beat her, so can't she just stay over a little longer? For extra messed-up points Tracy is also seen cutting herself, and that's a whole different ball of wax from what little I know about it, but hey, at least it prepares her for all the piercings that are in her future.
Tracy's a child of divorce, and her father is constantly too busy to visit, let alone be a guiding influence. Meanwhile her mother works as a freelance hairdresser just to make ends meet, and also has a live-in boyfriend, who seems OK but is probably another bad influence in some way. I don't think any of this explains or excuses Tracy's bad behavior, but I think somehow we're supposed to draw the conclusion that it's all connected somehow. Is Tracy acting up to get noticed, or just taking advantage of the lack of discipline coming from her parents? Those are kind of two different things, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the parental neglect causes the child's bad behavior, or if it's the other way around - or maybe it's a cycle once the ball gets rolling, who can say?
For that matter, did Evie completely drag Tracy into the world of bad behavior, or did Tracy jump into it herself? Which one influenced the other, or are they both co-conspirators? And how far will each girl go to misbehave and then try to cover it up when their mothers start to notice? Evie's mother is a model and actress who's never around, so we're left to conclude that her method of "hands off" parenting is the worse of the two options, but still she can't believe that her daughter is the "bad one", she's convinced it must have been Tracy corrupting Evie, not the other way around. Another cycle of bad behavior reinforcing itself, I suspect.
In all of this, it's the school work that gets neglected the most - which I think screenwriters are eager to abandon, even in films about good students. Classes are boring, in life and in movies, so it's often the first thing thrown out the window in school-based films like "Booksmart", "Good Boys" and "Superbad". You know what's more fun than seeing kids going to class? Watching kids go to parties, or trying to get to parties. Maybe if some screenwriter had allowed Tracy to pay more attention in class, or give her some time to focus on her homework, then she wouldn't have to repeat seventh grade. Just saying.
Also, there's no real solution offered here to the problem of Tracy's juvenile delinquency. The film ends after Tracy's mom blames Evie and Evie's mom blames Tracy for the situation, the relationship between the two girls is shattered, and Tracy and her mother are seen motionless together on a bed for a long period of time. Umm, that's not a resolution of any kind - you can't just raise a bunch of questions and not answer them - what's in the cards for Tracy? Can she straighten up and fly right, or has she been forever tainted by her experiences with sex and drugs? Will she learn anything in her second try at seventh grade, or ever do any homework at all? How much therapy is there in her future? A dream sequence of her on a playground isn't really an answer.
The director, Catherine Hardwicke, based Tracy on the real-life experiences of the actress who played Evie, as she was in a long-term relationship with Nikki Reed's father. And the two actresses playing 13-year-olds were really 15 or 16, because otherwise some scenes might have been illegal. Then that same director went on to direct "Twilight" (which I'm going to watch in early October) with two of the actresses from this film in it. But none of that affects my score for the film, which is based mostly on how much I enjoyed it - but it's not really a film meant to be enjoyed, is it? It's more of a cautionary tale, or for someone like me, a confirmation of my life choices to not have children who would only grow up to become problematic teenagers.
Also starring Evan Rachel Wood (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jeremy Sisto (ditto), Nikki Reed, Brady Corbet (last seen in "While We're Young"), Deborah Kara Unger (last seen in "White Noise"), Kip Pardue (last seen in "Remember the Titans"), Sarah Clarke (last seen in "Happy Endings"), D.W. Moffett (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Jenicka Carey, Ulysses Estrada, Sarah Blakly-Cartwright, Jasmine Di Angelo, Tessa Ludwick, Cynthia Ettinger (last seen in "Frailty"), Charles Duckworth, Jamison Yang (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Yasmine Delawari (last seen in "Mr. Brooks").
RATING: 3 out of 10 trips to the mall
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