A new class of teen movie

An R rating often keeps young people from seeing films with valuable messages for them. What's needed is a rating that would open up these films to them.

For years, film critics such as Roger Ebert have urged the Motion Picture Association of America to create a rating besides the economically fatal NC-17 for movies aimed at adults that deal frankly with vice and violence.

Maybe it's time to give the same consideration to teenagers.

This isn't a Pollyanna world anymore. Modern teenagers have more awareness of, and access to, unsavory activities than any previous generation. Parents often prefer to deny it, but children are growing up faster and taking more shocking risks. The denial usually ends only after children get caught, or worse.

Whenever filmmakers seriously address those problems, as director Catherine Hardwicke does in her film Thirteen, the motion picture association slaps an R rating on the finished product, effectively shutting out the audience that would benefit most from it. Or else filmmakers dilute the message to PG-13 levels, blunting its effectiveness.

Perhaps creating another rating - let's say Y, for "youth" - would identify films containing material that isn't comfortable for older viewers, yet could be important for teenagers sorting out their lives.

Thirteen, opening Sept. 19 at select theaters, comes directly from the source. The screenplay began as a journal written at age 13 by Nikki Reed based on her experiences. Now she's 15 and sharing screenplay credit with Hardwicke, plus co-starring in the film.

It's her life, emblematic of plenty of other teen lives, yet she can't buy a ticket to see it on her own.

Thirteen is rated R, an appropriate choice under current motion picture association standards. Hardwicke's film depicts middle school students involved with selling and abusing drugs, developing promiscuous behavior patterns, shoplifting and generally defying parents and authority.

There is no nudity or explicit sexuality. Certainly this isn't a pedophilic fantasy like Larry Clark's Kids. Profanity used by children in Thirteen is harsh but nothing worse than you might overhear when teenagers congregate. (It's a telling point that the most offensive word comes from an adult's mouth.) The most violent sequence shows two girls on a huffing high slapping each other to prove how numb their faces are.

That opening sequence establishes the film's theme: that irresponsible, self-destructive behavior can be fun until the thrill wears off and the pain remains. Consequences are suggested in Thirteen, but they're not juvenile courts or funerals that could be dismissed by youthful viewers as preachy or far-fetched. There are sorrowful, shameful ends that teenagers can more easily project themselves into.

Face it. The problem with teenagers today, and for as many generations as there have been problems, is a misplaced sense of invincibility. They don't believe anything - a "chicken" race, guns, narcotics, whatever - can hurt them. Teens in trouble always believe they'll be the one person smart enough to avoid death, arrest, overdose, rape or whatever. Usually they won't admit that the warnings of parents and teachers are right until things have gone terribly wrong.

Thirteen dramatizes a girl named Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) discovering those truths herself, the most effective way for modern teenagers to do it if they aren't ruined first. Her story is more common than many adults want to admit: a child tempted by the chance of school popularity into an increasingly dangerous lifestyle. In order to be cool, Tracy must lie, steal, abuse drugs and present herself as sexually wise. Hardwicke's film is honest about the allure.

However, unlike less responsible R-rated movies with youth appeal, such as Cruel Intentions and Wild Things, Thirteen doesn't let its rogue teens off the hook or punish them in ways beyond logic. What happens to Tracy could easily happen to anyone around her age in her situation. Keeping her consequences simpler than American cinema typically demands makes Thirteen more credible.

If the absolute worst happened to Tracy, teen viewers feeling indestructible would scoff. If she got away easily, those teens would be reassured.

It's that honesty that makes Thirteen a rare R-rated film that teenagers should see, and not necessarily with parents or legal guardians, as motion picture association guidelines suggest. I can imagine the denials, the "don't worry about me" dialogues that children might feel forced to recite to parents. But among peers who understand the film's honesty better than parents, young viewers of Thirteen might begin to make better judgments for themselves.

This isn't the first time an R rating has cheated teenagers out of solid citizenship lessons onscreen. Some of the best films in recent years contained positive messages for young viewers who couldn't buy a ticket.

The true drama Men of Honor starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as a Navy diver successfully breaking the color barrier would have been a fine model, especially for black males. But the actors cursed like sailors when milder language would have expanded the film's audience and impact.

As disagreeable as Michael Moore's politics may be, his R-rated Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine raised important questions about gun violence, especially among U.S. teenagers. Spike Lee's R-rated Get on the Bus is full of insight into black culture demolishing its monolithic image. Any teenager mature enough to handle it should see Schindler's List for Holocaust lessons and Requiem for a Dream for a frightening antidrug message. Like Thirteen, the independent film Better Luck Tomorrow showed what can happen when good kids go bad.

Meanwhile, filmmakers can stay within PG-13 boundaries - much of which used to be R material - and inspire teenagers to drive recklessly (2 Fast 2 Furious) and defy authority and celibacy in any number of thinly rationalized campus comedies. They can be taught that violence is entertaining (S.W.A.T.) and drugs are comedy props, such as with the pot-smoking granny in How to Deal. These are the lessons the motion picture association apparently doesn't mind conveying to youths, while serious cultural analysis such as Thirteen is offlimits.

Movies shouldn't be the sole educational source for teenagers. But as long as parents continue to surrender their influence to pop culture, filmmakers such as Hardwicke should be compelled to tell stories steeped in truth, not fantasy. They should be commended when it happens, not relegated to art houses where only adults are likely to see them.

And those films shouldn't be branded the same as other movies that don't care what teenagers do after paying their way into theaters.

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