From the archive: "Freaky Friday"

Freaky Friday forms a perky updating of the 1970s Jodie Foster flick, with Lindsay Lohan as the Avril Lavigne-alike teen who plays in a garage rock band and has, like, serious issues with the blonde high school president, and Jamie Lee Curtis as her stressed, overworked mother. One fortune cookie later, and the two have swapped bodies for the day, primarily to grasp vital life lessons, also so that these spoilt, materialistic Westerners can learn some kind of filial duty from the Chinese mother and daughter responsible for the swap. Overnight, Curtis becomes a spiteful ball of resentment making eyes at all the young boys; her daughter, meanwhile, is transformed into a neatfreak swearing off all physical contact. Out of all their live-action plots, this is the one most likely to get seasoned Disney execs in a flap unless handled with care and precision. The bodyswap premise is still disconcerting enough for the viewer to have to repeatedly remind themselves what exactly is going on, never more so than when Mark Harmon steps into the frame as Curtis's unwitting husband-to-be. Harmon plays the role as a blank dope, which only partially allays the film's underlying fear that a grown man is about to spend his wedding night with somebody with the mindset of an underage girl - or, even worse, with the underage girl herself.

As in the forthcoming family comedy School of Rock, though, shrewd scripting makes it possible to address all kinds of fears and other issues sparked by the presence of children in ways that are never tacky or patronising. Lohan is a more interesting screen presence than most Disney teens, and as for Curtis, well, if you are going to be limited to mother roles because of Hollywood's ongoing problems with the age of its actresses, this is the type of mother role you'd want to be offered: one that allows you to cut loose after a while. The great joy of this performance is that Curtis has realised the key to playing Lohan-in-Curtis's-body is not to approach the character as entirely distinct from her own, but as exactly the same character only with the difference of having shrugged off everything she's learnt over the past thirty years. It's funny stuff, seeing a formerly straitlaced shrink slumping in her chair or threatening violence against anybody who crosses her; the best scene in the entire movie is an unusually subversive Disney moment - a feminised version of Tyler Durden's speechifying in Fight Club - in which, while appearing on a primetime chatshow, this notionally responsible adult hymns the virtues of abandoning housework to eat takeout and listen to The Breeders. Mark Waters, director of the Parker Posey dysfunctional family comedy The House of Yes, milks this scene for everything it's worth: the calling card of another independently minded director moving effortlessly into the mainstream, if Freaky Friday inspires twelve-year-old girls to shun Westlife and Gareth Gates in favour of picking up a Ramones CD, it will all have been worthwhile.

(December 2003)

Freaky Friday is streaming via Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video and on DVD via Buena Vista Home Entertainment; a sequel, Freakier Friday, opens in cinemas nationwide this Friday.