Catherine Hardwicke (2003)
In the opening shot of Thirteen, the protagonist Tracy (whose age is the film’s title) looks straight at the viewer and asks to be hit. The camera pulls back to reveal the person she’s actually talking to – another girl, Evie. The sequence that follows, in which the two of them, laughing hysterically, whack each other increasingly hard (both end up with minor facial injury), is startling but the gaze of Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Tracy, immediately raised doubts in my mind. Wood is looking at you all right but there’s nothing much to see in her face. She suggests not the desperately rebellious early teenager that Tracy turns out to be but a young actress trying and failing to shock by her uncompromising stare (it’s like a screen test that really means business). In what follows over the next hundred minutes, Tracy is often in extremis but Evan Rachel Wood’s acting throughout is strenuously hollow. She was fifteen when Thirteen was made; Evie is played by the year younger Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the screenplay with Catherine Hardwicke. (The latter had been production designer on films such as Three Kings and Vanilla Sky. This was her first feature as director; she went on to make the first Twilight movie.)
According to Hardwicke (in an interview with Rebecca Murray for about.com, used for the BFI programme note), the character of Evie is:
‘… the combination of about three or four girls that Nikki [Reed] knew and two girls that I knew that I met a little bit later in my life. They had that kind of super-alluring and intoxicating personality that’s actually very toxic.’
What happens to Tracy, who falls under Evie’s baleful influence, is supposedly based on Nikki Reed’s own experiences earlier in her teens and, to a lesser extent, on Hardwicke’s too: although ‘I wasn’t gorgeous like Nikki’, Hardwicke spent time ‘trying to get in with the popular kids’. After the violent prologue, the story moves back four months, to the start of the school year. Tracy is a good student at middle school; she even writes poetry (to make clear to the audience that she’s essentially sensitive); but she wants to be accepted by her more popular peers and, as a result, to become more popular with boys too. Tracy starts thieving and, as Evie takes over her life, they do more and more together: they play truant, share a bed, drink, smoke cigarettes and drugs. Tracy gets her tongue pierced, then her navel, and is pretty soon into self-harming, repeatedly cutting her arms with a razor blade. The basic set-up puts Evan Rachel Wood at a disadvantage: since she is ‘gorgeous’ to look at, it’s hard to believe that Tracy would be derided by her classmates or desperate to ingratiate herself with them – Wood certainly isn’t actress enough to make you believe otherwise.
Nikki Reed, although she’s striking as Evie, is also very self-aware. Both of them – and everyone else in Thirteen – are trapped in a visual scheme which, given the grim and shocking subject matter of the story, is terribly obvious. There’s lots of urgent hand-held camerawork; Catherine Hardwicke and her cinematographer Elliot David bleach out the colour so that the images appear to be losing blood, just like Tracy. The only performer able to rise above the direction is Holly Hunter, as Tracy’s mother Mel. She is, in the words of the Wikipedia synopsis, ‘a recovering alcoholic and high school dropout, who struggles as a hairdresser to support Tracy and her older brother’. The role may be clichéd but Holly Hunter manages to blur the difference between Mel’s strengths and weaknesses, particularly her kind heart, and to create a layered character.
21 August 2014
