Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Being a parent is scary. The fevers and rashes of babyhood, the bumps and falls of toddlerhood, the realization that their math is too hard for you in elementary school. Every moment of fear, though, is more than countered by a moment of joy, gratitude and love so big it hurts. Until you reach the dreaded threshold: the onset of adolescence. The scares get bigger and more amorphous, those easy joys a little harder to come by. A single viewing of the film Thirteen will send a chill down the spine of anyone with the specter of parenting a young teenager in their future. No. That's wrong. It will send a chill down the spine of anyone.

Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) is what you might call a "typical" thirteen-year-old girl (if there is such a thing). Taking those first tentative steps into a world where the kids don't seem much like kids anymore, she wants to shed those last vestiges of childhood as quickly as possible and hurtle headlong into being a full-fledged teenager. The daughter of a struggling single mother (Holly Hunter), Tracy seems like a pretty well adjusted, relatively happy, everyday sort of kid. On the surface. But looks can be deceiving, and what's lurking beneath that young exterior is enough to make your toes curl.

Enter Evie (Nikki Reed). Evie is the hottest girl at school. The boys want her; the girls want to be like her. At least some of the girls want to be like her. At least Tracy wants to be like her. Tracy is like a moth to a flame, she'll do what she needs to do to hang out with this girl. We see her take her first (?) step down a long, dark road as she steals from a woman on the street to get an in with this crowd. Soon gone are the little girl clothes, the old friends, the concern for family or school. She's hanging with Evie. We know this can't lead anywhere good, and it doesn't. We watch Tracy spiral the drain in slow motion, each action taking her one step further from the girl she was and one step closer to an adolescent that is every parent's nightmare.

Thirteen is a powerful film for a lot of reasons. Evan Rachel Wood is heartbreakingly real as a confused and angry young girl with a rather difficult life and too much time on her hands. This is a complicated character. She seems very innocent and content at the opening of the film, but we soon begin to see a side of her that has clearly been simmering for some time. She isn't a simple sheep led astray by a wolf. She sees something in Evie that she wants. Not just the "cool" or the popularity, but the recklessness and the feeling of freedom that Evie represents. Hanging out with this girl gives Tracy permission to jump directly into the deep end, which is precisely where she wants to be. The movie never goes the route of making Tracy the reluctant victim. It would have been so easy to make her a good girl swept into things she neither wanted nor could control by the simple desire to be popular, but this is not an easy movie. And Tracy is not an easy to love protagonist. She's angry, and impulsive, and fearless, and scary. She represents a whole world of teenage behavior that it would be far more comfortable to pretend does not exist. What she is, most of all, is incredibly self-destructive. To see that in a child so young is like a kick in the teeth.

Evie is also complicated, but not as deeply developed a character. Played by Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the screenplay and upon whose life the character of Tracy is purportedly based, Evie is a scheming, amoral, pathologically manipulative girl far too old for her years. If there's a flaw in this characterization, it's a tendency to make Evie a little too harsh, a little too smart, a little too much. Unlike Tracy, it's hard to see the thirteen-year-old in Evie. Only rarely do we get a flash of the vulnerability of extreme youth, a bit of insight into what makes Evie tick. So yes, the characterization may be a touch extreme, but it's also a necessary component of the film. Evie is the catalyst for Tracy's behavior. We're seeing the downward spiral of many months in two hours, there needs to be something spurring Tracy on, "showing her the way", if you will. Where in real life their relationship was likely far less one sided, as evidenced by the attitude and actions of Tracy herself, on film there needs to be something pushing things to the next level. That something is Evie. She isn't unbelievably over the top, she's just a little less real feeling than Tracy, but as a catalyst providing the film with forward momentum, she's perfect.

The other major player in this story is Melanie, Tracy's mother. Holly Hunter is at her fabulous best as a woman with far more on her plate than she can possibly handle. She's a recovering alcoholic and a single mother of two teenagers who is a hairdresser out of her home for a living. She has an ex-husband who is uninterested in his children and a boyfriend with major problems of his own. She's distracted, but she's trying. Unfortunately for Tracy, trying isn't really enough. Before the onslaught of Evie, Tracy was already indulging in clandestine behavior that would have made her mother shrink in horror had she known. Once the two girls begin their "friendship", it's difficult for Melanie to play the bad guy, to set limits and enforce them. She trusts her daughter, understands the importance of popularity to a teenager and at the bottom of it all just wants her daughter to like her. Her slow disintegration from holding on to hitting bottom is fascinating to watch, as Hunter's appearance, mannerisms and demeanor perfectly reflect the stress her character is feeling. Never once do we doubt this character's feelings for her children, yet we want to shake her and make her wake up to what's happening under her nose. It's a fine line that the film walks - acknowledging the failure of a parent to act without demonizing that parent.

In fact, the film doesn't really demonize anyone - quite a heroic feat. The progression of Tracy's deterioration is, for lack of a better word, logical. We see and understand (at least on some level) why she does the things she does. Her motivations are fairly clear and her actions don't feel unreasonable - at least not for a character so profoundly immature - in light of them. Director Catherine Hardwicke (who also co-wrote) also wisely chooses not to convict an entire demographic of the behavior we see in Tracy and Evie. There are other kids in the film who are not on the brink of disaster. Some care that Tracy is, some don't, but they aren't all lumped together into some whirling, out of control mass of badness and stupidity, nor are they broken into neat little categories for easy classification. They're just kids. This is the story of one girl's life, and doesn't pretend to be something else. It's definitely a cautionary tale, but told in a personal way - what happens to one girl, given a whole host of complicated circumstances.

Technically, the film is well done, if not dazzling. There are occasional bouts of that irritating wobbly camera work that seems to want to indicate "realism", but in fact just makes the audience a little queasy, but they are few enough to easily overlook. There are times when you'll want to look away as the girls are about to indulge in some horrifying behavior or another, but the anticipation of the event is nearly always greater than what is actually shown on film. In fact, there is very little that is gratuitous here. We see enough to understand exactly what is going on, but not enough to make us squirm with the discomfort of seeing such young people in such compromising positions. Cinematographer Elliot Davis needs to be credited for a spectacular sequence near the end of the film in which all the color leeches slowly from the proceedings. It's a beautiful bit of symbolism that fits the scene perfectly.

As adults, we probably will all see parts of our pasts in this story - bits of people we knew, maybe even bits of ourselves. And this is where the ultimate power of the film lies. Not in telling us that teenagers are bad. Or that their parents are bad. Or that any one of the circumstances in which Tracy is growing up is bad. But in showing us how a confluence of relatively common events not really under any one person's control conspire to make a thirteen-year-old girl into a frightening stranger. I don't know what Nikki Reed intended as a message when she decided to commit these events to paper, and ultimately to film. Perhaps a warning to parents, perhaps a warning to kids, perhaps a simple purging of an incredibly painful past. What she succeeds in giving us is a loud, scary reminder that becoming an adult is a long, hard process with a whole lot of places to fall through the cracks. As a parent, it tells me to pay attention, and remember what it's like to be so young and needy and vulnerable. Thirteen is an excellent, heartbreaking, frightening film. I highly recommend it.


Recommended: Yes