THIRTEEN (2003) (A-minus) - Twenty-two years later, Catherine Hardwicke's brazen debut still feels like a daring provocation. It is an urgent adolescent wail but with an intense focus on how a divorced mother copes with a girl's initial flirtation with growing up. And that may be Holly Hunter's finest moment.
Hunter plays Melanie, a hipster mom who is clinging to her sobriety as she tries to make ends meet styling hair in her kitchen. Evan Rachel Wood is her 13-year-old daughter, Tracy, who at the beginning of the film is quite girlish, with her dorky clothes and stuffed animals. But at school she soon catches the attention of Evie (Nikki Reed), who looks and acts like an adult. Soon Tracy has ditched her loyal pals for Evie's gang of bad girls -- who are into drinking, drugs, shopping (stealing), piercings and older boys.
The transformation may seem startling at first, but even 22 years ago 13-year-old girls were susceptible to the allure of adulthood, or at least the juvenile-delinquent simulacrum of growing fierce and independent. Melanie and her ex-husband have never had a solid grip on Tracy's behavior (she has been secretly cutting herself). And Melanie has no good tools to deal with a rebellious young girl. Especially when Melanie is determined to stay sober (what was she like as a teen?) and has her own needs to fulfill -- Jeremy Sisto is fantastic as Mel's boomeranging boyfriend who is fresh out of rehab. Tracy seethes at her mother's display of sexuality and co-dependency while aspiring to those exact same goals.
Hardwicke (who would make the big leagues with the "Twilight" movies) shoots guerrilla-style, and her camera itself is giddy as it races through a lean L.A. with these rampaging teens, their still-forming brains besieged by hormones. Meantime, the household is suffocating, especially when Evie, fleeing an irresponsible parental guardian, moves into Tracy's bedroom and the boyfriend crashes with Melanie.
Reed, who is a commanding screen presence, co-wrote the script with Hardwicke, based on her own experiences. (Hardwicke once dated her father. Reed was 15 when the film came out; Wood had just turned 16.) The story juggles both the exploitation of young women's bodies and the girls' hedonistic (if misunderstood) desire for freedom. Gritty is an overused word, but the milieu here -- working class, marred by abuse and addiction -- is raw and real. Melanie is on her last nerve throughout, often on the verge of a breakdown, and she is willfully blind to how Tracy suddenly came into all the clothes and bling, not to mention the cries for help that emanate from Tracy's Nine Inch Nails-style poetry.
At the climax of the film, when the scales fall from Melanie's eyes, her maternal instincts are feral and her love pure and absolute. It takes an awful lot for a wild teenage girl to break her mother's will. Melanie might have her limitations as a parent, but you cannot doubt her devotion. Everyone will need to be wrung out at the end of this emotional bobsled race.
BANTU MAMA (2022) (B) - From the underbelly of L.A. to the slums of Santo Domingo ... this one also features drugs and bad behavior and kids acting like adults -- in this case truly necessary for survival.
French traveler Emma (Clarisse Albrecht) is busted with drugs in her suitcase during a vacation to the Dominican Republic. She manages to escape police custody and flee to a barrio in Santo Domingo. She is a light-skinned Cameroonian who somewhat blends in with the local population, and she hides out in the home of three children, whose mother is dead and whose father is in jail. And so she mothers them. The older boy is a young adult who hangs out with gangsters. The adolescent younger boy, Cuki, respond to Emma's nurturing. The middle child is Tina (Scarlet Reyes), a young teen who wheels and deals like a mobster, providing for the family.
Tina, using the threat of her incarcerated father, pressures a lawyer to help Emma escape, with the hope that Emma will take young Cuki with her and rescue him from a future of poverty and violence. Reyes is the beating heart of this film by director Ivan Herrera. She is like a street cat, surviving by her wits and claws. Emma's simple act of teaching Tina how to wrap her hair in a bandanna offers the girl a modicum of dignity amid the chaos.
Albrecht -- who co-wrote the script -- is an elegant presence, keeping calm while bonding with her makeshift new family and awaiting escape. Emma has left a pet parrot behind in France, and she and Herrera use artsy shots of birds in the sky to drive home both that sense of neglect and her yearning for freedom, a return to middle-class comfort. This is a slim 77-minute movie that knows its characters and where they're going.
BONUS TRACKS
"Thirteen" has an edgy alternative soundtrack, including the sultry "Nicotine" by Annette Ducharme (who goes by ANET):
Over the closing credits, Liz Phair, from 1993, with "Explain It to Me":
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