Read a spiritual exercise for empathy practice.
It is very difficult to keep empathy alive in these nasty, aggressive, push-and-shove times. Of course, it is needed now more than ever as a lubricant to facilitate or a salve to mend our relationships and help us draw us closer to those we regard as strangers, enemies, and the other. In the home, empathy is a treasure that cements familial bonds. Just what that means is spelled out in this movie about a feuding fifteen-year-old girl and her widowed mother. Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon wrote the screenplay based on a book by Mary Rodgers. (Another screen version came out in 1977 and starred Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster). Mark Waters directs this snappy comedy that hits the mark again and again with its on-target observations about youth and middle-age.
Dr. Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) is trying very hard to stay on top of things at home and in the office where she is a psychotherapist. But Anna (Lindsay Lohan), her adolescent daughter, uses her energy in ways that rub her the wrong way. For instance, she is constantly fighting with her younger brother, Harry (Ryan Malgarini), and seems to have nothing else on her mind but her rock band that practices in the garage. Of course, from Anna's perspective her well-meaning mom is a control freak who just can't go with flow or understand the pressures that weigh upon her slender shoulders. Where mother and daughter really differ is in their views of Ryan (Mark Harmon), who is about to marry Tess.
Their disagreements erupt into a major mother-daughter shouting match one evening in the back of a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant owner's mother (Lucille Soong) sees what is going on and offers them some magical fortune cookies. The next morning — Freaky Friday — mother and daughter find themselves inhabiting each other's bodies. Since Tess's wedding is Saturday, they are under considerable pressure to switch back.
We've seen this plot device in other movies but seldom have the two characters been so natural and endearing as these two. Anna-as-Tess goes gaga when she realizes that she now has the wherewithal in credit cards to get some new clothes and a different hair style. And she really savors the moments when Jake (Chad Michael Murray), the high school guy Anna has a crush on, finds himself attracted to her. Of course, standing in as a psychotherapist during appointments and a television interview about her new book gives her insights into the added stress her mom faces outside the doors of their home.
Tess-as-Anna shocks her daughter's classmates with her new seriousness and Puritanical habits, such as pulling down a friend's shirt because she is exposing too much midriff. She finds pleasure in putting down a teacher (Stephen Tobolowsky) who is making life very difficult for her daughter with unfair grades. Tess's admiration for Anna's skills as a lead guitarist come to the fore in a very funny sequence when the band auditions for a gig on the same evening as the wedding rehearsal. The sagacious Chinese woman has an agenda in her empathy exercise for Tess and Anna, and it works.
In The Power of Empathy, Arthur P. Ciaramicoli and Katherine Ketcham observe: "When we adopt other people's perspectives, we do more than step into their shoes — we use their eyes, we borrow their skin, we feel their hearts beating within us, we lose ourselves and enter into their world, as if we were them. . . . Through that experience we are fundamentally changed, for we see with a sudden, startling clarity that we are the other. All the good and the bad that we see in them we can also recognize in ourselves." Freaky Friday is a first-class comedy that makes empathy into an appealing bridge-building virtue.
The DVD has two minutes of very funny bloopers, a deleted scene, and three alternate endings introduced by director Mark Waters. Two music videos and a behind-the-scenes featurette with Lindsay Lohan round out the extras.
