It is a commonplace, thinking about THIRTEEN, that significant social developments in America, good or bad, spread across the country from the East and West Coast. With the close of the Frontier, according to the Bureau of the Census in 1890, matters of importance began to shift more to the West. In recent decades, blame for these developments more often than praise has fallen upon our Western shore, Los Angeles in particular. LA, that huge inchoate metropolis risen from Native America roots on a Spanish stock to bear from Middle Europe the Movies, has in the last four decades been watered by Television, the commercial and sex-soaked wisdom of which now flows round the World. The West Coast was historically the End of the Line for restless Americans and immigrants, but recently it has become an influential starting point for the X-Generation.

THIRTEEN, Elizabeth Hardwicke's first movie, gives adults a close-focus look (which young parents might prefer to avoid) at what threatens to become the normal self-mutilated, tattooed, pierced, and dyed thirteen year-old sex object. THIRTEEN is also a powerful, matter-of-fact depiction of sudden maturation in the life of a lower-middleclass girl of today's Los Angeles.

The reviewers of THIRTEEN here, most of them male, have tended to be contemptuous toward the young girl and her experience.

As one Epinionator puts it: "thirteen (it's spelled that way in the movie's credits) opens with a girl facing the camera, begging some unseen friend to wallop her. By movie's end, you'll be more than happy to grant her wish."

The young girl, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), overly made up for her age and trendily dressed, is on her bed, huffing aerosol from a can and, as if it were the funniest activity imaginable, trading punches with her new pal, Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed). Not quite able to feel the blows, she needs a near knockout punch to send her back four months to the day she first met the tall, slightly latina, Evie. Shy, self-conscious Tracy, the fresh-faced 7th Grader, with several neighborhood companions, enters LA's Portola Middle School for the first time. Shaped by thousands of hours of Television shows, revved by countless raunchy, hardly understood pop songs and suggestive radio commercials, titillated by the latest teenage idols, cowed by ads of perfect models, and surrounded by billboard entreatments, she separates herself from her old schoolmates to pay barely-teenage homage to Evie, the sophisticated big sister she doesn't have.

Breezing around with her jaded posse, Evie rejects Tracy, on a basis of her good-goody looks and "so-past-it" clothing, but shines her on, nevertheless, with a cynically false invitation to call her up, for a bit shopping on Melrose Avenue. Excited, so eager to fit in, Tracy persuades her mother, Melanie, to buy her a more with-it outfit for the expedition.

Melanie (Holly Hunter, in another superb performance), a nearly exhausted, recovering-alcoholic mother of two, can hardly hold herself together, far less her family. Divorced from an indifferent husband, she feeds her son and daughter with chickens and eggs she raises in the backyard. She supports her menagerie of children, animals, hangers-on and visiting relatives by operating a beauty shop from her home. One of Melanie's many implied weaknesses is that she longs to become her daughter's big sister, perhaps deep in her soul, to live through her daughter. Like most people's lives, hers has not gone as she dreamed it would. Tracy is her second chance.

Recognizing this quite vague outing's importance to the girl, Melanie finds her daughter more timely clothing at an outdoor fair. In return, Tracy reads her a pretty terrible but heartfelt poem she has written, and Mom, unprepared to interpret it, nevertheless, accepts it. Melanie instinctively knows something is wrong with her daughter but fears the possibilities so much that through most of THIRTEEN, she avoids seeking the truth, even when it is in front of her. The bonding act is soon rent when Melanie takes back an old boyfriend, Brad (Jeremy Sisto), who has disgusted Tracy in the past by passing out over a bong.

When Tracy phones Evie's cell-number, it is a phony, but Tracy, undeterred, goes in search of the Zamora posse, around the smart shops of Melrose. Mildly impressed by Tracy's new outfit and her zeal, recognizing a new potential clonie, Evie lets her tag along. She and her friends are really impressed when Tracy slips a buck-laden wallet out of a preoccupied businesswoman's purse, at a bus stop.

From there, the cornucopia's contents, shared over time, provides for clothes, cosmetics, and a lot of other "stuff" teenagers are told by the commercial society they must have. When the money runs low and an easier, less bothersome method is needed, Tracy learns to shoplift small items, such as a pair of panties with a cheeky remark appliqued across the front of the crotch.

A visit to Evie's home shows Tracy an even more chaotic household than her own. Evie's "mother" proves to be an out-of-it alcoholic cousin/guardian/model, Brooke (the strikingly gorgeous Deborah Kara Unger, looking a wreck). With bottles of beer to self-medicate her recent cosmetic operation, Brooke shows Tracy the result: horrendous looking stitches along each side of her head. ("They cut off my ears. See, they cut off my ears!") The girls, bringing Brooke a cold one, take an amused beer break for themselves.

Tracy decides that her new friend needs a real mom, and so she takes Evie home to Melanie. Reluctant at first, for it is a cause of friction between her and her boyfriend, Melanie cautiously moves into the role. If Evie can have Tracy as a clonie, why can't Melanie have Evie for a daughter or . . . or a sister? The trio is soon striding out together in one of THIRTEEN's most telling images: Three sisterly hot babes, similarly dressed like runway models, almost but not quite identical to each other.

What Melanie-Mom does not know is that her daughter is cutting classes and then school to hang out, drink, have herself tattooed (where it won't show), and in a particularly distasteful scene, to have her tongue pierced for a stud.

Not much time elapses before Evie is sleeping over, engaging Tracy in teenage lesbian experiments, and soon she has introduced her to the swains of their diverse neighborhood. Emboldened by the prospect of fresh meat, one of them crawls through the bedroom window one evening and leads the girls to a spot where another lad or two are waiting. Before morning, Tracy has gotten high and given her virginity casually to a young black man. As in most such encounters, the guy is satisfied, but Tracy is depressed. Later, when gossip about events of the evening is passed around, an older young black woman takes offense.

Within another few weeks, given her moral pain and disaffection, modeling herself after the slightly whacko Brooke and her plastic surgery, having been tattooed and pierced, Tracy undertakes with Evie to mutually install bellybutton rings. The next almost logical step is crude self-mutilation.

Perhaps only Tracy's brother, Mason (Brady Corbet) is the only character who sees the truth and is sympathetic toward her, but in the code of the teenager, he is too loyal to tell anyone else what is going on.

Looking again at the epinions of male reviewers, one is struck by the contempt they have for THIRTEEN and those who were impressed by it.

One of these reviewers tells us: "I should preface this review by saying that I saw the movie with a group of generally conservative, sheltered 22-23-year-olds, and they found the movie much more moving than I did. Perhaps it's because they're closer to jr. high than I am, perhaps they saw things growing up that, culturally, I missed by three or four years. Or perhaps, more probably, they were sheltered prep-school ivy-league conservative-minded liberal nitwits who wouldn't know reality if it jacked them in the face. They enjoyed the movie, so if you fall into one of the aforementioned categories [or all of them], you'll probably enjoy this movie, too."

[And so, we have been warned . . . I guess.]

The general line in a number of the reviews seems to be that THIRTEEN is either a boring collection of cliches and walking stereotypes, or a portentously false and exaggerated vision of American teenage degradation. This sort of thing, they suggest, happens only to trailer trash cuties, girls of the ghetto, runaways, and undocumented aliens.

Now, true, the Movie THIRTEEN has its flaws, and one would be a mistaken to generalize from it to the experience of all American teenage girls.

What should give grown men (and women) the shudders though is how powerfully THIRTEEN presents both the Beginning and almost the End of a young girl's prepubescence in the same year -- in four months of that year, actually. THIRTEEN, in accomplishing that feat, certainly makes the careers, if they choose to exploit them, of the three principals -- Director Hardwicke, formerly a production designer; Writer Reed, who also plays the "villainess," Evie; and especially the incandescent Evan Rachel Ward, as both the "Good Tracy" and the "Bad Tracy" -- in a film of great poignancy.

Tracy, after all, is a minor, a child, who a year or two before would have been playing with Barbies and teddy bears, not risking diseases and babies.

Children have always been utilitarian in American society, kept around to till the fields and make the shirts. Now, in a large number of families, it seems, kids do not even have that worth. They are afterthoughts, ornaments or then embarrassments -- to be suffered, if they cannot be discarded. Shown in the impressionistic colors and the cinema verite tracking shots of Eliot Davis (WHITE OLEANDER, Kozminsky, 2002), Tracy is not one of those girls, nor is Melanie one of those parents, but each is a generation or two away from it in their family history.

If one-in-five girls becomes pregnant between the ages of 12 and 20, that is a price we pay for our indifference. The girls pay a more immediate, often painful price to our Society, which in its vaunted superiority, leads the Western World in illegitimate pregnancy rates. And if more than half of girls from minority families become pregnant between the age of 12 and 20, and a higher percentage keep their babies, the spill-over influence on "the majority" teen population, given time, is bound to become significant. If we go back to the 1950's in America, a small percentage of teenage girls had lost their virginity by the time they were 16. Today that percentage is a rather large and growing one.

That fear is an implied theme of THIRTEEN.

Indeed, the great fault of THIRTEEN,if we accept it, is its largely innocent, almost unconscious, perhaps realistic racism: Controlling Latino tattoo artists, and horny young blacks crawling through neighborhood windows. From the viewpoint of 13 year-old Nikki Reed who became 15 year-old screenwriter Reed, that danger seems a bottom line. Self-censorship and Director Hardwicke's mature judgment softens the theme, with mixed results. The bite of the film is slightly attenuated, and Latino or black characters are only swiftly sketched stereotypes who serve a function and disappear.

It can be argued that repressed sexuality among precocious females was once a social ill, but I don't think we would like to match it against the troubles caused by abortions, unwanted pregnancies, illegitimate children, cases of child abuse, and disheartening poverty which appear today rather common. Add those sad facts of life to alcoholism (the most common American addiction but one little known among middle class teens before the First World War), dope addiction (infrequent for middle class teens until the late1950's), and self-mutilation (once a rare psychiatric specialty), and then "a generation at risk" seems less of a cliche.

Do Miss Reed and Ms. Hardwicke throw in a few extra kitchen sinks? Probably. But Hardwicke and Reed, from their standpoint, are trying to make a responsible film, without either trivializing it or sensationalizing the experience. Pretty rare these days. Working from Nikki Reed's diaries, including her own experiences with Reed's father (whom she dated for a time), Hardwicke shaped the story rather accurately, it seems to me. Think what she might have done: Tracy develops a massive systemic infection from belly button piercing! Tracy contracts HIV! Tracy runs away to the Ghetto or the Barrio! Tracy gets pregnant! Tracy has a black child! Tracy murders Melanie's lover Brad! Tracy murders Evie! Tracy becomes the victim of a serial killer! Evie joins a gang which ritually sacrifices Tracy!

Although a few of the above family social earthquakes are hinted-at possibilities, none of the lurid outcomes fall on Tracy. Like her mother, possibly her grandmother, she will probably become a normal woman of her time, passing on to her children a growing burden of twisted values and tribal wisdom.

Therefore, a great and comforting aphorism about free will comes to mind: "Every human heart asserts its existence; all history denies it." Yes, agreed, it really wasn't Evie, or the billboards, or the siren song of popularity that almost destroyed Tracy. In the end, all of us must be thought responsible for our behavior, even Tracy, but given the contradictions of our culture, there will be more like her, along with incremental social and political collapse. [And that factor, as much as crazy crusades at home and abroad, will probably sap the Great American Empire, as it has empires before.] At a given moment, by the moment, the future, as it must, slips irretrievably into the past.

Speaking of that truth, which is at the heart of THIRTEEN, one might reflect on how a generation is defined as the period it takes a society to procreate. That period is relative and rather arbitrary. In early Biblical times, after a golden age when people were said to have lived hundreds of years, a generation was measured by the length of a man's life, a long time, 80 years. [Clearly, women were not consulted in the matter.] In a later Biblical day, a man was urged to avoid procreation for the first 40 years of his life. When Mankind came into the Medieval period, a generation was measured by a man's prime: 33 years (though he often failed to survive that long). In America, the practical number of years in a generation has dropped steadily, to 25, then 21, and recently to 18, now perhaps to 16; and it is the woman's age, for recent purposes, which is coming to determine the length of a generation. In some states, the marriageable age (occasionally with a circumstantial wink and nod) has long been 15, 14, 13, even 12 years-old.

Just as the age of menses (because of societal stimulation, some experts suggest) has dropped steadily over the last five decades, what may become a statistically meaningful number of girls so young as nine years are reported becoming pregnant, in recent studies.

It is in this Janus gaze of innocence and experience where the significance of THIRTEEN lies.

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Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older