Curtis the Comedic Thunder Who Gives Disney’s Latest Freaky Friday Its Energizing Pizazz
Walt Disney Studios is having an amazing run this summer. First, the delightful Holes comes out at the end of April and surprises everyone by being an intelligently magnetic family drama firmly grounded in old-school Disney tradition. Then The Lizzie McGuire Movie not only doesn’t suck, but ends up being agreeably silly TV-to-feature fluff centered on a simply delightful turn from Hilary Duff. The studio can thank Pixar for the year’s best — and most profitable — film (so far), Finding Nemo, while the theme park adaptation Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a wildly entertaining swashbuckler throwback featuring a stellar performance from Johnny Depp that by all rights should deliver him an Academy Award nomination.
The studio’s miraculous run of successes continues with a remake of Disney’s 1976 Barbara Harris-Jodie Foster gem Freaky Friday, and what sounded rather dubious in theory proves to thankfully be anything but. Utilizing the sublime talents of Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role is a stroke of comedic genius. It is by the sheer will of her fiery, playful, and profoundly childlike turn that this new variation on Mary Rodgers’s classic novel proves to be irresistible. I liked this one a lot.
In this adaptation, Curtis is Dr. Tess Coleman, a stressed-out therapist who balances a thriving private practice with raising two children as a single mother. Youngster Harry (Ryan Malgarini) would be trouble enough by himself, but it is teenager Anna (Lindsay Lohan) who has mom pulling her hair out. The two can’t seem to get along, especially as it concerns Tess’s fiancé Ryan (Mark Harmon) and Anna’s musical ambitions.
During dinner at a Chinese restaurant, things reach a boiling point between the duo, and this leads to a rather unusual fortune cookie. After a good night’s sleep, both women discover that neither’s life is a bed of roses, as each wakes up to find the dawn peeking through the shades of the other’s bedroom window. They’ve switched bodies, and now they are stuck living life as the other until mother and daughter can find a way to swap back before the rest of the world becomes privy to their surreal situation.
The younger-older, parent-child switcheroo has been done many times — Big and the original Freaky Friday in my opinion best play with the theme — so there are not too many places that writers Heather Hatch and veteran Leslie Dixon (The Thomas Crown Affair) can take the screenplay that we haven’t journeyed to before. I also could have done without much of the bathroom humor that seems to be something of a personal trademark for director Mark Waters (The House of Yes, Head Over Heels), and many of the sequences featuring Malgarini did little for me. I found him moderately annoying.
What Waters does bring is a playfully snide subversiveness that makes even the simplest story elements ring with an unexpectedly probing idiosyncrasy. He handles the misunderstandings between mother and daughter with aplomb. Waters understands that the conflict at the heart of their prickly relationship is mostly internal, and that all the external dangers they’re forced to deal with during their swap are rather minor when compared to the emotional damage that’s germinating in their guts thanks to the pair’s refusal to honestly communicate with one another.
I also liked how the director uses music as an eventual tool for harmony between Tess and Annabell. Culminating in a raucous concert at the House of Blues, Waters stages the climax as not only a big event overflowing in energy, but also as an intimate component of the pair’s reciprocal love. It’s a minor cliché that sometimes the deepest emotions have to be sung to be fully expressed, and Freaky Friday does just that with effervescently wondrous results.
Curtis is the perfect foil for all this madness. As good as Lohan is (and she’s wonderful), this film is a dynamic showcase for the A Fish Called Wanda, Trading Places, and Halloween icon. Whether playing Tess as the frumpily controlled career woman or freestyling with improvisational abandon as the disguised Annabell, Curtis is a show-stopping force of nature. This is the best part the actor has had in years, at least since 1994’s True Lies.
Imperfect as it may be at times, Freaky Friday is still one of the summer’s most entertaining endeavors, and I can’t wait to watch it again. But for Disney, that’s just the way this year seems to be working out for the studio, and decades from now, I think we’ll look back on 2003 as one of the best and most memorable that the studio experienced throughout the entirety of the 2000s.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
