THIRTEEN (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003) 77

Reviewed: July 28th, 2003

[Spoiler-free.]

2003 might go down as the year of arthouse adolescence, with films like Blue Car, Manic, Sweet Sixteen, Lilya 4-ever, Raising Victor Vargas and now thirteen all gracing screens within a half year span. Noting the caveat that I abstained from Lilya 4-ever, lemme declare thirteen is the most affecting and riveting of them all, depicting adolescence as a sort of expressionistic, virtuoso assault (lensed by Elliot Davis with a fiery, casual fervor -- his cinematography will be almost impossible to beat as my vote for best of the year), though without harboring the unrelenting despair and terminal(ly pointless and cruel) lack of hope constant in something like Sweet Sixteen and -- I've been told -- Lilya 4-ever. This is a lightning bolt of a picture, with stars Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter delivering two of the most shattering performances of the year. Their work here is perfectly indicative of the shimmering sense of ravage which lights the whole film, particularly found both in Davis's aforementioned camerawork as well as in the fractured, jazzy editing rhythms (random outbursts capturing the mood swings of adolescence) and the structural repetition of the screenplay (mirroring the circular motions of day-to-day adolescent livin'). Granted no one can deny thirteen doesn't follow predictable patterns or traffic in the typically limited dramatics of the majority of youth movies (mainstay elements include broken homes, poverty, theft, questions of popularity, experiments with sex and drugs and alcohol, etc.), but it's also a lot more ambiguous than these kinds of films (or most any films for that matter) usually are. Everything here is presented as a sort of swirling mass of incidentals; thirteen doesn't harp on one or two elements (like surrogate parents in Blue Car or romance in Raising Victor Vargas), it just carefully mounts scattered chunks, collecting problems and clefts like a tornado rapidly gathering speed. The film is very much a success achieved in the details of presentation (fitting for a first-time director/erstwhile accomplished production designer [Hardwicke's past credits include Three Kings, Vanilla Sky, The Newton Boys and Tombstone]), not revolutionizing paths or sentiments so much as throw-away exchanges and supporting characters (especially in Jeremy Sisto's cokehead who's about as far from the typical abusive asshole as you can get and D.W. Moffett's gloriously offbeat performance as a dad at once clueless, vaguely caring, surprisingly candid and a loveable son of a bitch in a The Royal Tenenbaums sorta way). At most every turn, Hardwicke has a crucial knack for resisting caricature and contrivance: we know the parental figures in these becoming-a-teen-is-rough movies are gonna be problematic; we know the protagonists are gonna spiral downward. It is in the hows and the whys and the small crevices in between that thirteen presents a vision as fresh as almost any other this year.

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