Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan star in a body-swapping remake that addresses the pressures that drive parents and teens apart.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
Remakes have been getting a bad name lately, thanks in part to cynical sequels that capitalize on an audience’s affection for a movie by reviving the main characters and some of the most popular bits. But if recycling plots made for bad theater, Shakespeare would have been in big trouble.
What makes a good story is not how often it’s been repeated but how well it’s been told, and one of the best candidates for a remake is an intriguing premise that has never been turned into a first-class story. The trick is stripping the tale down to its chassis and rebuilding it from scratch, which is just what producer Andrew Gunn, director Mark Waters, and screenwriters Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon did to Freaky Friday, the rusty 1976 Jodie Foster vehicle.
Freaky Friday is one of a long line of comedies where two people switch bodies thanks to some kind of supernatural event. The moral of these stories, of course, is that you can’t understand another person until you’ve walked in his or her shoes literally but the real appeal lies in watching two very different characters struggle to impersonate each other. Done well, that’s a rich source of laughs.
In this branch of the genre, the switch takes place between a parent and child. Several movies have explored that idea, including Like Father, Like Son, two versions of Vice Versa, and, of course, the first Freaky Friday.
Both versions of Friday are upbeat, family-friendly Disney fare which goes to show how our sense of what’s appropriate for prepubescent middle-class girls has changed over the last quarter century. The original was set in an idealized suburban two-parent family. To illustrate the difficulties of its housewife mother’s life, it fell back on slapstick like burning a turkey, putting too much soap in the wash and juggling several repairmen at once. The update features a tightly wound working mother on the verge of remarriage and her teen-age daughter, a strong-willed Avril Lavigne wannabe who plays rock guitar and spends way too much time in detention.
There’s still plenty of shtick, like when the girl’s devious little brother runs willy-nilly through the yard, blinded by a pair of underpants his sister stuck on his head. But most of the humor comes from seeing the sardonic Anna (Lindsay Lohan) change places with her earnest mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), a psychiatrist who urges her daughter to "make good choices" and tells her "privacy is a privilege."
After the switch, Tess (really Anna) confounds expectations by taunting her son, recoiling from her fiancé, and gleefully racking up credit card bills on frivolities like an extra ear piercing and a spiky haircut. Meanwhile, Anna (really Tess) tugs on a friend’s shirt to cover her exposed navel and informs Jake, the boy Anna has a crush on, that he’s too old for her.
Curtis and Lohan make their alter egos at least as believable as their original characters. A convincingly surly rocker as Anna, Lohan is a hoot as Tess pretending to perform in Anna’s body, selling her solo with the perky smile and mechanical dance moves of a member of the Partridge Family fast-forwarded into the 21st century. And Curtis, a gifted comic actress who hasn’t had a role this juicy since A Fish Called Wanda, clearly loves playing Anna, her eyes lighting up and her face and body loosening.
The men in Tess’s and Anna’s lives have the least plausible roles. As Tess’s fiancé, a preternaturally pleasant man whose only distinguishing feature is how utterly undistinguished he is, Mark Harmon is in danger of seeming more dense than devoted as the woman he steadfastly adores morphs into an eye-rolling, inarticulate teen. Anna’s sleepy-eyed love interest, Jake (Chad Michael Murray of Dawson’s Creek and Gilmore Girls) fares better at first, rejecting Anna and falling for Tess after the two swap personalities. He’s soon playing the fool too, trailing after Tess like a lovestruck puppy and getting knocked down like a Bobo doll by both mother and daughter. But the love and resentment between Anna and Tess are palpable enough to make you want to forgive any weaknesses in the rest of the plot.
In a season of hype-heavy disappointments, Freaky Friday is a pleasant surprise. Although it’s a remake, it’s funny and fresh. For an escapist fantasy featuring magic fortune cookies, it’s bracingly realistic about the pressures that drive parents and teens apart and the love that binds them together.
Rated PG. Contains mild thematic elements and some language.