Movie Review:
Sweet Thirteen in Richmond

by Michael Nicolella

[The film was presented as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's American Independent Visions series.]

Thirteen

Directed by: David Williams, 1997
United States, 87 minutes
Featuring Nina Dickens (Nina), Lillian Folley (Lillian)

Nina is a sullen and uncommunicative girl who lives in Richmond, Virginia with Lillian, a retired convalescent nurse who narrates. The film introduces the major characters and then begins its tale with Nina's thirteenth birthday. Afterwards, she disappears, having hitchhiked into the mountains where she wanders for several days. When she comes home she wants to begin saving money for a new car. Family members and neighbors take her to interviews for positions as a real estate agent, a computer technician, and an artist's model, which turns out to be for a nude piece. She ends up taking pet-sitting jobs, getting rides to them from the same friends and relatives.

Nina Dickens as Nina, in David Williams' Thirteen.
Image courtesy Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Nina spends much of Thirteen apparently wondering why she is there in the first place. The characters in the film are related in actual life much as they are on screen, and in the film they go by their actual first names. While Thirteen was scripted with an outline, many of its situations are improvised, and the portrayals have a different strength than would performances by actors. The film is driven by the opaque motivations of people in common circumstances, who have come to know each other through love and chance during the courses of their lifetimes. Because of the way it has been made, Thirteen has unusual scope and focus regarding these motivations.

Lillian contends with unshaped doubts regarding herself and her daughter. She is an older woman whom neighbors visit for advice and a steadying hand, and the matriarch of a respectful extended family. During a scene that takes places outside the timeframe of the narrative, Nina assists Lillian at the bedside of a now-deceased boarder. During this time Nina is typically quiet and undemonstrative. Afterwards, Lillian tells the camera that she is not afraid to die, saying "I believe in heaven. Nowhere else for me to go. Where else am I goin' to go?" The question of Nina's actual mother is left unanswered; in actuality Lillian is Nina's foster mother, and several of Nina's onscreen cousins share her family name, Dickens.

The characters act like people who've been asked to portray themselves in given situations. A few references and conversations in the film establish a selectively ranging history of the family and the neighbors. Interactions with these people reveal Nina's difficult personality. At one point she argues with a lodger who paints portraits, over her fee to sit for him (this is not the painter of nudes). It becomes an obvious parable of the film's creation: she wants to back the painter into a corner and raise her price, while he tries to convince her that she will learn about the artistic process. She says, "I don't care about art," as she argues for a higher rate, and in exasperation he says, "I'm gonna be making the art." As the portrait gets made there are more opportunities for comment from everyone involved.

In another scene, a discussion of taste between the painter and Lillian revolves around a holographic plastic clock depicting Jesus Christ that Lillian is giving to an amused visitor. Other moments involve a man who tells bad jokes, conversations about love problems, visits from Lillian's friends, and Nina's growing interest in boys. The style is not documentary realism: Nina has frequent dreams about her cousin, Niecy, a giggling, energetic toddler whom she chases around the yard. The shots from this scene have the beauty of small moments in ubiquitous surroundings.

Nina Dickens as Nina, Keith Birdsong and Bill Brock as Men at the Pond.
Image courtesy Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Nina's journey into the mountains includes several interactions with different types of contemporary characters from the back country of Virginia. Filtered through her complex and vague personality traits, these scenes depict watershed changes in her life, which she only explains near the end of the film. Far from being a cliffhanger or plot-twister, viewers take part in this unstylized and involving story, watching a life as it develops.

About the Author:

Michael Nicolella often writes movie reviews for the Newsletter.

Resources:

The Film Society of Lincoln Center included this film, Thirteen, in its recent American Independent Visions series. Details can be found at the FSLC website: http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/6-2000/thirteen/thirteen.htm