Freakier Friday

I grew up on two Freaky Fridays: the original with Jodie Foster and the remake with Lindsey Lohan and Jaime Lee Curtis. This is one of the few cases in which I think the remake was better than the first. That’s another article for another time, but needless to say when a Freakier Friday was announced my sister and I planned on seeing it unless we read something horribly scandalous. My first instinct with follow ups on films like this is to check content, then plot—and typically aside from Imdb there a couple Christian reviewers I checked just to ensure they hadn’t added any unnecessary content. Hannah and I saw it with our mother, and we enjoyed ourselves together…. However, when it comes to honest breakdown and review of the film, I confess it didn’t fall short of my expectations—just short of the first film by a substantial margin.

The Good:

As I said in the beginning of the article, me, Hannah and my mother had fun at this movie. Now granted, like Joe, Meg, Marmie and the March girls— we find ourselves and our own reactions, interactions immensely entertaining regardless of what we watch. However, there were parts that were legitimately funny, and the actors are comedically talented. I remember thinking Lindsey Lohan was talented since her Parent Trap debut when she was eleven years old (another family movie I grew up watching).

• Jaime Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan give ridiculous but at times very entertaining performances as teenage girls in their mother and grandmother’s body. Curtis is a believable comedic, but at times cringeworthy helicopter grandmother. Her relationship with Lindsey Lohan’s character –Anna—is still one I’m sure mother daughter duos will watch relating to and find humorous. I appreciated the positive but not black and white familial aspect of the film: Lindsey Lohan is a single mom, and her mother and her stepfather help her in raising her daughter, they all seem to have a close relationship and support each other. Despite the fractured family dynamic due to Anna raising Harper by herself, I haven’t seen as positive a portrayal of familial support like that in modern cinema for some time. While the struggles were portrayed a little on the nose and cheesy at times, the attempt to show real family trouble was in earnest and it did strike me with doses of reality since I’ve seen similar dynamics.

• The theme of family first does prevail at the end of the film. It was difficult to watch at times because I have very little patience for bratty wild teenagers and the two girls in this movie fit that description to a tea. However, despite the two teenagers that swap with Lohan and Curtis trying to sabotage their parents’ marriage the whole film it concluded by showing both their behaviors to be wrong and the consequences of their selfish actions. The teenage girls think of nothing but themselves and it takes them seeing things through the adults’ eyes to realize their actions have consequences.

• The daughter of Anna’s future husband—Lily hates the idea of merging the families more than Anna’s daughter Harper. She tries to wreck the relationship for the longest time till she sees that her actions are hurting her father, and that things can’t be fixed as quickly as they were broken. She realizes that being an adult means it’s not all about you. The teenagers learn to set their selfishness aside for the sake of their parents when they see how much the parents have sacrificed for them.

• The conclusion was good, I liked the reconciliation between Anna and her daughter Harper at the film’s finale. I knew the song Baby was about Anna’s daughter before hand and hearing the lyrics the daughter probably should’ve guessed it to.  The lyrics “I just keep on coming back, I’m your good and I’m your bad” and “I’m your sunshine I’m your rain, only I can ease the pain” describe well a strained but loving relationship between family members in which they cause each other sadness and joy but no one can take their place. Both parties are continually making mistakes, but they always strive to make it right. They keep returning even if the apologies or words aren’t perfect because they want to preserve the relationship.

Overall, I think aside from the actors comedic talent I think the reason it was enjoyed by the public was because the film at least knew what it was trying to be. It had positive portrayals of family relationships that while flawed were still treated as something valuable to be preserved despite our mistakes and differences. Tess Coleman’s husband and the fiancé in this were extremely patient and their struggles were again, somewhat real. Tess is a helicopter grandma who needs someone to be mothering and so she pays more attention to her daughter’s wedding than to her husband. That is a real struggle for women who were such active mothers: their children grow and if no one needs to be mothered anymore, they feel they’ve lost their place. What the movie shows is such a mother hasn’t lost her place, it’s simply that her role and the dynamic has changed. This was addressed when the husband Mark Harmon tells Tess who’s trapped in the teenage girl’s body that he worries about his wife because she’ll be lonely if she can’t take care of Anna and Harper anymore. In real life there is a season for everything, and we can’t get stuck in old stages of life as if they’ll always stay the same. I appreciated this theme because if I haven’t said this enough, there’s an epidemic in films where there’s no real-life application. I watch them and don’t see real people behaving or reacting to struggles in a way that blends with reality. In this the character archetypes were clear, and the actors understood the assignment. The writers and the director…they may have given the cast a flawed assignment, which is where I believe the weak points of this film came through.

The not so good: It took me a minute to mentally gather what exactly made this film more of a C (being generous) where the first film came closer to an A in it’s field. I’m judging this film like the first one, per it’s intention/assignment: a family/mother daughter/coming of age comedy. The original was cheesy at times, with the Asian voodoo body swap serving as an explanation to the antics but it did a good job at executing it’s mission. It was genuinely funny, heartwarming, creative, and actually made you see things from the opposite perspective –whether you identified as the mother or the daughter. I identified more as the daughter when I was younger and as I grew up I gradually sympathized with the mother more. This movies’ issues I believe I can summarize into three parts.

The Story was weaker: This is the most obvious one I left noticing. In the first film, Tess is getting married, she has a strained relationship with her teenage daughter because her husband died only a year ago and a huge hole has been left in their family. The daughter doesn’t understand what the mother is dealing with, and the mother thinks the daughter has it easy being a spoiled teen who’s entitled. In this movie having two additional teens tossed in the story was already a challenge because we have to know, care about, and be invested in their struggles enough to be entertained and sympathetic watching them switch with Anna and Tess. And because the story they set up in this one, is that the daughters don’t want their parents getting married and basically use the body swap to sabotage them—it was hard to be invested in their story.

• In the original the two women switch, and we see them each learning how hard the other has it and how they really don’t understand each other as well as they thought. In Freakier Friday, we’re watching the two girls try to break up a wedding which just makes them spend the movie being selfish. In the first film, even though Anna is unhappy about the wedding—the extent of her selfishness is grumbling and complaining. She isn’t happy about the wedding but she would never dream of ruining it. When she thinks she has, she actually stopped to talk to Ryan (her soon to be father in law) and make it right.

•   There’s a lack of sympathy in getting to know the girls who switch with them because the daughter of Anna’s fiancé just seems like a brat. In the first film Anna is rebellious but we see her struggling with bullies at school, dealing with her mother getting remarried, and with jerk teachers who are prejudiced agaisn her. When she comes home and lets the frsutration out at her mom who assumes she’s at fault, we still feel bad for her because we see how frustrating her life is. But Lindy has very little care about hurting her own father by trying to break up his marriage, and we don’t see her struggling with anything in school except a response to her being bratty. Again, is this forgivable and can it be a good message if we eventually show she’s being selfish and she makes it right? Yes, but it makes the subject matter of the film much less enjoyable.

• In the first film, Anna lets it slip to Tess’ fiance Ryan that she thinks he doesn’t care about Anna or her band. It slips out naturally because the perspective of the moody teenage daughter is that adults are out to spoil her fun, and her mother only cares about her new boyfriend. It’s an awakening moment for Anna because she sees Ryan respects Tess’ family, and that he doesn’t want to be a part of it if his fiance doesn’t think he wants to put Anna nad her brother first. It’s the teenagers moment of seeing how much the adults really do consider them in all their life decisions and that her mother isn’t only out to ruin her life. After that Anna likes Ryan, and is now more supportive of the union. In the sequel, the teenagers frequently see that their parents are trying to think of them and that they really love each other but it takes practically the whole film for them to stop sabotaging them. In the first film Anna isn’t dislikable she’s just flawed, and responsing to her mothers’ flawed attempts to connect by lashing out.

Weaker comedy and over the top zany antics: That brings me to the next point, in the first film every scene rolled into the next and the comedy felt natural. The comedy comes as a natural consequence of the characters switching lives. In the first film Lindsey Lohan in her mother’s body has a quick scene where she goes shopping and gets a haircut, which is quickly followed by her going to her therapist job and the comedy is just her going through her day as a 15 year old. It makes sense, moves fast, and is funny all at the same time. It's not lengthy or drawn out for no reason. Freakier Friday was two hours and there were quite a few scenes that didn’t feel like they had a purpose other than to be funny without advancing the plot.

• In Freakier Friday there’s a lengthy scene of a photo shoot at Anna’s job where the two teens stuck in the adults bodies just wear silly costumes and take pictures. It doesn’t advance the plot and the comedy felt forced.

• There’s a scene where Anna has wedding dance rehearsal and her daughter (in her body) Harper does tango and 80s dance moves. It was kind of funny but landed weakly because it felt like it was something just added to be ridiculous and put the character in a silly situation. We see Anna’s wedding at the end and it’s a simple modest garden wedding, so why are they practicing crazy dance moves like they’re gonna do some modern wild thing?  In Bride Wars (a film that has its faults and pitfalls but the plot felt more natural than this) when there’s a silly dance class scene it’s because the friends are feuding. Kate Hudson literally paid a terrible dance instructor to act silly and make Anne Hathaway do crazy stuff. In this it’s just like the people are zany for seemingly no apparent reason.

• There’s a lengthy scene of Anna and Tess in the teen’s bodies’ running around eating fast food and getting ice cream because they can. This felt out of character because Anna is getting married the next day and is somehow getting sidetracked by food. In the first film when Anna stops to get food it makes sense because a teen would get MacDonalds and just forget that she’s not in a 15-year-olds body. The mom fights her over the food and it’s a silly two-minute scene that makes sense. They’re headed to the Chinese restaurant to figure out how they got switched and it doesn’t pump the brakes on the plot but manages to be amusing. In this film it’s like they carve time out to be silly and it doesn’t move the plot.

• Also, another example of dumb comedy was Jake. He had no purpose in this movie other than to show us it’s a good thing Anna moved on from her highschool romance because he became a loser. For some reason Jake has a thing for Anna’s mother. In the first film he only liked Tess because she was acting like Anna, so really—he liked Anna. But in this movie, he became a creeper with a crush on Tess and elderly married woman and dates women who look like her….it was weird. And just another example of cheap comedy and a storyline that wasn’t natural.

That’s the thing with comedy, it comes from characters behaving as they naturally would in strange, stressful or silly circumstances. And for that to be effective you have to know how characters would behave. We had little time getting to know the teenage girls in this movie and when we did it was mostly them fighting. It was hard to keep track of who was switched with who because we didn’t know the girls well enough to get their characters and be invested. There was also simply a talent gap between the two younger actresses and Lohan and Curtis. In the first film Lohan holds her own because she’s been acting since she was eleven and there’s no imbalance when she’s on screen with older, more experienced people. In this movie I noticed the younger actresses acting capability looked more along the lines of Disney channel—mostly with Lily. Harper was fine, she did a decent job of mimicking Lindsey Lohan’s mannerisms and speech patterns, but I could see her trying at spots. And regardless of who was playing them, it is a task to get two teenage actors and introduce them as new characters to a sequel of a film everyone already knows so well. In summation, compared to what’s coming out I can see why people enjoyed it… but the writing, comedy, and overall execution of the theme wasn’t exceptional and extremely sub-par in comparison to the first film.