August
18, 2003, 9:00 a.m. Freaky
Acclaim
Stuck
in a “suckfest”?
By Thomas Hibbs
ll's well that ends well in the remake of Freaky
Friday, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman, an overworked
and hyperactive psychiatrist and mother of two who is about to be remarried.
Now, Freaky is not a bad film. It has some laughs, and a happy,
if sappy, ending that will satisfy viewers' desires for the appearance
of reconciliation and domestic unity. It is, however, the most over praised
film of the summer. The film opened to rave reviews, with just under a
90-percent positive rating from the reviews culled on the indispensable
movie website, Rotten
Tomatoes.
Perhaps it was the
excessive expectation based on the nearly uniform praise for the film
that abetted my disappointment; or perhaps it was the predictability of
every "twist" in the film; or perhaps it was the film's uncertain
hovering between a pure, light comedy and a message movie; yet again,
perhaps it was the clichéd characterizations of mom and daughter,
who wallow in self-pity throughout most of the film and then are rapidly
transformed just in time for the ending. The film ends with a kind of
saccharine seriousness that, I fear, far too many viewers will think is
"so cute."
Early in the film,
tensions between mother and teen daughter, Annabell (Lindsay Lohan), escalate
over dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The elderly owner of the restaurant
decides to inject a little Eastern wisdom into the lives of mother and
daughter by feeding them magical fortune cookies. They eat the cookies
and wake up the next morning having swapped bodies; at which point Jamie
Lee Curtis, whose body is now inhabited by her daughter's soul, looks
at her face in the mirror and issues the best line of the film. In horror
she shouts: "I'm the crypt keeper!" It is indeed a good line
and there are others. The film's best scenes involve excellent physical
humor from Curtis, who revels in the opportunity to play a teenage girl.
But there are also
issues and scenes that might make parents attending with kids uneasy.
For example, the mother is remarrying yet no mention is made of the absent
father, who he is, or why he's absent until we're well into the story.
Then there is only the most cursory of references to his having died,
but this comes in the midst of a blunt argument between mother and daughter.
Now, an adult viewer can see what is going on here — the tensions
between mother and daughter are largely if not exclusively due to their
failure to come to terms with the death of the father. This is addressed
explicitly at the very end. But up to that point, there is likely to be
serious confusion in the mind of young viewers. Moreover, the film dwells
a bit too much on the relationship between the daughter's would-be boyfriend
and the daughter while she inhabits the mother's body. Of course, the
point is that he is really attracted to the personality of the daughter,
a personality that the daughter found herself unable to express until
she was able to inhabit an adult body. But as for the boyfriend himself,
he thinks he's falling for the about-to-be-married mother of a female
classmate. The scenes are not salacious but they would cause less discomfort
were they played clearly and lightly for laughs; instead, the incessant
injection of meaning into these scenes lends greater seriousness to the
boy's affection for an older woman than is necessary or comically effective.
One explanation of Freaky Friday's success is the desperate hunger
for films that families can attend and enjoy together. And Freaky
is certainly better than Johnny
English but it ranks well beneath Nemo
or Seabiscuit
and far below Holes,
a fine family film from the spring that is destined to be a minor classic.
The problem, as I
hinted above, lies at the very core of the film, in the characterizations
of, and the relationship between, mom and daughter. The two remain self-absorbed
and mutually accusing throughout most of the film, "stuck,"
as the daughter inside mom puts it, "in this suckfest." The
film is never quite that. But it would have been a better film, and much
funnier, if the filmmakers had made the mom and daughter more human and
more sympathetic, as is the case with the characters in Holes,
or just utterly clueless, as is the case, for example, in an older comedy
such as Raising
Arizona.
How long can Hollywood
continue to play off of the self-absorbed teenager and distracted parent
routine? Indefinitely, I fear, given the critical praise and popular success
of Freaky Friday.
—
Thomas Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor
University, is author of Shows
About Nothing. Hibbs is also an NRO contributor.
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ll's well that ends well in the remake of 
