HOLLYWOOD, 30 August 2003 — In the arty exploitation flick “Thirteen,” first-time director Catherine Hardwicke cranks up the volume to maximum shriek. A story of a Valley girl gone bad, the film energetically samples a couple of reliable standards: the classic juvenile delinquent movie that’s as much a romp as a cautionary tale, and the emotionally damp after-school special about cross-generational confusion, then whips them up into a frenzy. The look is fresh — it’s a tossup if the film or the kids are more stylish — even if its story about a girl martyred on the cross of reckless youth is as old as Joan of Arc’s.
Boys will be bad boys, “Lord of the Flies” nasty, but as anyone who’s ever been a girl knows, it’s the wee women who are truly scary. Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) figures this out the first day of junior high. A tentative girl with the long, reedy limbs of the newly sprouted, Tracy enters her new school smiling, only to be elbowed aside by ugly Darwinian reality.
Next to the gum-and-thong-snapping Lolitas, Tracy and her cute ankle socks are so 12 years old. She looks like a veritable baby next to the school’s reigning babe, Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed), a sly, sultry beauty who looks like she was dreamed up by Jail Bait quarterly, but was in fact cooked up by Hardwicke and Reed, using the young actor’s life as inspiration.
Beauty and the beast in one, Evie is a classic femme fatale and, as the story takes its inevitable course, a monster manipulator. She and her friends rule the school and its boys, and although Evie doesn’t immediately notice the new girl hovering nearby — excited, curious, eager to join in — she’s quick to pounce. Evie knows what she wants (power); Tracy thinks she knows (popularity). What Tracy can’t know is what being the envy of everyone else costs Evie. The new girl wants something else, too — another female to cling to instead of her mother, Melanie (Holly Hunter).
“Thirteen” with its ferocious energy and lead performances is many cuts above most big-screen soap operas. Hardwicke throws herself and the camera into the fray and rarely steps down the pace.