by Bill Chambers
OVERRATED
THIRTEEN
*½/**** Image B+, Sound A, Extras B-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke
I wrote my first script at around the age that 16-year-old Nikki Reed was when she collaborated with her father's ex-girlfriend Catherine Hardwicke on the screenplay for Thirteen. In an attempt to shape a thesis about the almost-unwatchable film made from this memoir of Reed's pubescence, I browsed that script (something I haven't done in over a decade) looking for examples of didacticism; by page three, a character has died from smoking, with cigarettes themselves characterized outside passages of dialogue as "cancer sticks." This was of course written in tandem with my own misadventures in smoking, but do as I say, not as I do. (Call it Harmony Korine Syndrome.) Teenagers make exceptionally bad screenwriters because all teens are Catholic, in a sense–every rebellious action has an equal and opposite guilty reaction. Manifested in confessional writing, that hypocrisy can be deliriously egotistical.
Case in point: the lesson of Thirteen (not to be confused with David D. Williams's similarly themed 1997 film Thirteen) is–my lips to God's ears–don't befriend Nikki Reed, who plays the most popular girl in school, a libertine named Evie. (You know, as in Adam and Evie.) With a hysteria usually reserved for sex-ed films, the faux-anthropological Thirteen tells of Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), a 13-year-old wallflower with a crippling desire to penetrate Evie's inner circle, her success at which transforms her into a belligerent, amyl nitrate-sniffing, kleptomaniac strumpet. Our own Travis Hoover writes in his review that "depicting the comedown from the trip" keeps Thirteen from becoming an Afterschool Special. With all due respect, Trav: balderdash! The only thing separating one from the other is that Thirteen indulges in the freedom of its R rating–and even at that, Afterschool Specials were fuelled by controversy. The show spent a record 27 years on ABC's daytime schedule because it was the only place a kid could get some decent exploitation outside of PayTV.
But if we weren't once treated in an Afterschool Special to anything as salacious as Thirteen's starlets wrestling pierced tongues, the correlative between Thirteen and the Afterschool Special paradigm is nonetheless incontrovertible. Both get their own highs from schadenfreude, and so they make active volcanoes out of molehills simply to enjoy a more sadistic backslide. Thirteen comes close to ending with admirable restraint, but it's the fake-out set-up for an apocalyptic intervention climax that itself invites the same amount of relish as watching the mortification of Stephen Glass in Shattered Glass. (And therein lies the problem: the girls become so rabid that you just want to see them put down, Cujo-style. (They Were Expendable might have been a better title to steal.)) It's also worth noting that the Afterschool Special protagonist was almost always female and hooked on drugs–on those occasions when she wasn't knocked-up instead.
In her DVD commentary with Hardwicke, Wood, and actor Brady Corbet, Reed deflects blame for her bout of parental mutiny: Everything is the fault of her siren corruptors, the so-called "hottie patrol," and, hell, she wanted to play Tracy, not Evie, since Evie's role required her to dress provocatively. Obviously someone put a gun to her head and forced her to take the part, then; when, one wonders, will Reed ever learn the meaning of accountability? (What are kids supposed to get out of the picture, anyway? That substance abuse and promiscuity lead to…a redemptive movie deal? Could sex and drugs look to children any more like candy post-Thirteen?) Reed's pulled the wool nicely over Hardwicke's eyes, I see, what with Hardwicke pitying her former charge in a deleted scene that finds Evie trashing Tracy's wardrobe–another plot point based on a real-life transgression of the hottie patrol. You'd think Reed were Anne Frank facing the Gestapo at that moment.
THE DVD
Prototypically ugly of cinematographer Elliot Davis, Thirteen arrives on DVD in a faithfully blotchy transfer. Side B features the film in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen plus a section of ten elided sequences, while side A houses an unmatted presentation, the film's trailer, and a 6-minute making-of featurette that opens with the less-than-articulate Hardwicke summarizing Tracy's arc thusly: "She goes from being a good girl to being sort of a bad girl." Alert Bartlett's! I will offer that the Dolby Digital 5.1 track of both versions is quite aggressive for a movie of this nature.
UNDERRATED
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY
***/**** Image: A, Sound A, Extras C+
starring George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Geoffrey Rush, Cedric the Entertainer
screenplay by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen
Not only is it the Coen Brothers' feeblest film, it's also lacking in their visual signature. (As if by the divine circumstance of Steven Soderbergh vets George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones headlining the cast, it more closely resembles the handiwork of Peter Andrews (Soderbergh's ASC pseudonym) than Coen regular Roger Deakins. Must be the preponderance of amber-yellow lighting.) I would go so far as to wager that, if the duo had doctored the script with an auteurist mindset, the jokes probably wouldn't register as sitcommishly as they do–producer Brian Grazer spent eight years persuading them to direct their easy-money rewrite. And yet, half the pleasure of Intolerable Cruelty is watching the Coens play it safe: There's something taxing about Coen Brothers films that's absent here. It's a purer screwball recipe than either their bloated The Hudsucker Proxy (that heady blend of Hawks, Capra, and German Expressionism) or their strangely ephemeral O Brother, Where Art Thou?–an unfettered game of one-upmanship between the Thirties archetypes of the unscrupulous romantic (Clooney) and the man-eater (Zeta-Jones). The sibling filmmakers are responsible for successive pictures in which life happens to the characters busy making plans, but here's one in which the stars align for the traditional Coen-verse scheming couple. Intolerable Cruelty tastes like champagne even when it's flat, and the retribution of an asthmatic hitman named Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes) belongs in a pantheon of classic slapstick right next to Chuck Jones's Daffy and Bugs short Rabbit Seasoning.
THE DVD
Universal releases Intolerable Cruelty on DVD in competing 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and fullscreen editions. Luckily, we received the former for review, a handsome presentation that overcomes a curious jaundice plaguing Universal transfers of late. The image is at times as tactile and elegant as crushed velvet, and compression artifacts are undetectable in spite of the multiple soundtracks and bonus features. Glorious, too, is the DTS 5.1 mix (superior to the Dolby Digital alternative(s) on board), a surprisingly dynamic track that renders Carter Burwell's score–as well as Vegas ambience–with overwhelming spatiality. Dialogue is consistently clear and supple. Though "A Look Inside Intolerable Cruelty" (12 mins.) is your standard-issue puff piece, the presence of the Coen Brothers means idiosyncrasies abound–Paul Adelstein's name inexplicably causes Ethan Coen (wearing a "Piggly Wiggly" T-shirt) to chortle, for instance. Crucially, the featurette justifies the typecasting of Billy Bob Thornton as a hick in genre terms, calling Thornton's "the Ralph Bellamy part." In the 5-minute "The Wardrobe" (a.k.a. "A Look Inside Intolerable Cruelty: Costume Design"), costumer Mary Zophres, a Coen staple since Fargo, reveals that she modelled George Clooney's suits on Cary Grant's in Indiscreet. Finally, the selection of "Filmmaker Approved and Assembled Outtakes" is capped by a cheekily monotonous loop of silent-movie train footage ("Rex Rexroth's Home Movie"), although presumably it's as long as it is because it ensured that the video would not run out in the middle of a take. One thing's for certain: you'll never want to hear the phrase "Everybody eats berries" again. Cast and crew bios and a forced "Focus Features" promo round out the disc; ROM content is listed but, as far as I could tell, nonexistent.
- Thirteen
99 minutes; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround, Spanish Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; Fox - Intolerable Cruelty
100 minutes; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; English, English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Universal
