There but for fortune go ‘Thirteen’ viewers

Thirteen-year-old Molly Winawer really, really sobbed at the conclusion of the nightmarish film “Thirteen,” a horrifying portrait of a mother’s heartbreak.

In the movie, Tracy, equally 13, morphs from a loving daughter who gets good grades, baby-sits and sleeps with stuffed animals into a flunking, raging, LEAVE-ME-ALONE, lying, thieving, smoking, drinking, drugging, sexing stranger.

She becomes addicted to a drug named Evie, the wildest and most popular girl at school. Under her intoxicating influence, the seventh-grader squeezes into super-low jeans and midriff-flaunting tops, the better to show off her bellybutton ring. She pulls hard in a tug of war with her single mother, a high school dropout and recovering alcoholic who never has enough money.

This unflinching portrayal of hard-core pubescence shocks baby boomers who are unaware that 13 is the new 21. It frightens mothers with teenage “children.” It also makes many moviegoers cry.

Like Molly Winawer.

The pretty, slender teen with long, blond-streaked hair wears trendy “wife beater” tank tops, but she also sleeps with the stuffed bunny she’s had since she was a baby. “Thirteen” made her cry “because some of the people I go to school with have gotten into some of these problems.”

She’s not talking about an urban public school, like the one Tracy and Evie attend in the movie. She attends a small, private, all-girls school, where fewer than 100 classmates will start eighth grade with her next month. Some, she believes, smoke cigarettes, do drugs and drink.

Her mother, Jackie, cried too.

“You really felt like you were going through the life” with Tracy and Evie, she says. She recognized that life. “I had a sister who ended up ultimately committing suicide. She got into trouble, heavy drugs, the wrong crowd, and wanted to be accepted -- just that classical story.”

Parent’s dilemma

Jackie Winawer, who at 49 still has the body of the dancer she was in high school, also cried. “You do the best you can,” she says.

Her daughter may come from a different environment and enjoy tremendous support, but “kids go out into the world ... they come across kids, they go to parties and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s a parent’s dilemma.”

She also says, “I know that kids are having sex earlier and earlier, and until Molly hit 13, I wasn’t really, really, really fully accepting that that’s going on out there and she may be exposed to it. But seeing it in the film and knowing that it portrayed some very accurate life circumstances, I was awakened. A lot.”

She took her daughter to the R-rated picture as part of Teen Passage, “a program and a sacred journey, shared by parents and their daughters as they travel from preteen into adolescence,” which she and her friend Lyn Benjamin created for their own girls.

Despite warnings from friends that the film would scare her because she has a 13-year-old, Benjamin saw it at the Sundance Film Festival. When she returned from Park City, she took her daughter, Rachael, to a screening at the Directors Guild and invited Jackie and Molly too.

“It should be a must-see for every parent,” says Benjamin, who encourages them to take their kids and then talk about it. “It deals with real issues in an amazingly candid and sensitive way, and you see how easy it is for a girl to fall into a pattern that is so destructive, and a loving parent can really miss the boat.

“There’s that one scene when Evie says to [Tracy’s] mom, ‘Oh, you’re so young and hip and cool, you could be my sister.’ ”

That made this mom think.

“I stay up on the music. I’m a cool dresser. I’ve got a bellybutton ring,” Benjamin says. “I recognize that’s one way of staying close, but you have to have that balancing act. It’s not about being a best friend. You’ve got to be a teacher.”

History repeated

Susan Ostermann, 61, knows that -- now that her children are adults. When they were younger and going through major challenges, she says that like the mother in the movie, she tended to have that best-friend relationship with them.

“From a mother’s point of view, you’re so afraid your kid is going to die. You want to do anything you can do to take away your kid’s pain,” Ostermann says.

She attended a screening of “Thirteen” arranged for her employer, Phoenix House, the substance abuse treatment organization. Like other moms, she took a daughter. Her youngest, Beth, who had worked in postproduction on the movie, kept telling her, “Mom, it’s our story!” But theirs had a good ending, both mother and daughter in recovery.

“I empathized with the mother,” says Shifra Bemis, 52, who attended the Hollywood premiere. “I realize that each of us as mothers at times look away from things. She knew ... what was happening, but she didn’t want to look at it....Once you face that, it’s scary. You have to let go of that image that your child is innocent.”

“It was really a wake-up call to me as a mom that you better not let things go too far,” says Bemis, who has a 13-year-old son, Joel, and a 19-year-old, Max. “If you wait too long, you’ve really got one mess on your hands. Like when they’re on the Internet. You can’t be on their back all the time,” but you need to know what they’re doing even when they don’t welcome the parental attention.

Because her older son has a tongue ring, Bemis says, watching Tracy get one in the movie was hard for her. She “couldn’t imagine he went through that.” But she wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with the sexual aspects of the story. When Max was growing up, she says, he told her stories about kids having oral sex -- even at bar mitzvahs.

Hard to watch

Others also found parts of the movie hard to watch. Like “when she was cutting herself,” says Molly Winawer. Tracy relieves her emotional pain with physical pain. She’s a “cutter,” repeatedly slicing into her arm, always drawing blood.

And “when she was getting her tongue pierced,” Molly says, adding that “at school, a few people tried to pierce their [own] bellybuttons.” Even so, she wants to see “Thirteen” again.

“What happened to the girl is really unfortunate, but the movie was solid. I was happy to see it because it made me feel good about myself,” she says. “Whenever I have these little problems, and I cry or whatever, I think this is nothing compared to what happened to her.”