Thirteen
"Thirteen'' opens with two adolescent girls punching the Hello Kitty out of each other in a pastel suburban bedroom. They're high on something - chemicals or hormones, it's all the same - and as they hammer into each other's faces, they giggle with rapturous pain. They're best friends. This is what they do after school, before mom comes home.
Catherine Hardwicke's overheated shocker of a movie comes at you with the same blunt force, and it wants to convince you that this is what your kids are up to, too. It's a worst-case scenario that preys on parental fears of the monster movie lurking within every teenage rebellion, and it's fed by memories of what we got away with when we were young. Scared yet?, the film asks. Just wait.
When the story proper begins - after we've rewound several months from that in-your-face opening - LA teenager Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) still has both feet in girlhood, but she's seething with dissatisfaction at the hand she's been dealt: long-gone dad, preoccupied and financially pinched single mom (Holly Hunter, one long worry line), mom's recovering-alcoholic boyfriend (Jeremy Sisto). All she needs is a push.
It comes from her cool-clique classmate Evie (Nikki Reed), who sizes up this cabbage-patch kid and sees a potential acolyte. Tracy passes the shoplifting test, starts dressing for distress, and dabbles in drugs; from there it's a quick hopscotch to belly-button rings, self-mutilation, and - avert your eyes! - making out with black guys. Then things get worse.
All this happens so quickly that mother Melanie looks at her daughter and still sees a helpful preteen darling, at least for a while. There's truth in that delusion, and in the way the film analyzes the vicious caste system of junior high; both observations probably stem from Reed, who co-wrote the script with Hardwicke when she was 13 herself (i.e., last year). Right there lie the strength and weakness of ``Thirteen'': It gets to the mad heart of adolescence - to the way each moment can matter more than anything that has ever happened before - but it's powerless to step back and provide a more measured perspective.
Why should it, when terrorizing a nation of moms and dads is lots more fun? ``Thirteen'' seems of a piece with such fretful nightstand reading as ``Reviving Ophelia'' and ``Queen Bees & Wannabes,'' but all it does is exploit the fears those books address. You can't stop this from happening, Hardwicke and Reed are saying. All you can do is duck and run, and be there with a hug when the fever passes.
If that's depressingly reductive, one thing is certain: Wood, in a breathtaking progression from her Jessie Sammler on TV's ``Once and Again,'' gives a pedal-to-the-metal performance as Tracy. That this delicate blonde could contain such hurricanes of rage is the most subversive notion the film has to offer, and it works because Wood grounds her character in unfiltered sorrow and anger.
It's the movie's relentlessness, though, that will make it a succÁes de scandale at upscale suburban movie theaters. Even the poster for ``Thirteen'' aims a tongue stud at the heart of the minivan set, and the reasons for the R rating (see above) quiver with hysteria.
Would it be rude to suggest that your time might be better spent with your own children?
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