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Cosmetic Procedures Make Freakier Friday Confusing As Hell
If you haven’t yet walked a mile in someone else’s shoes, you can once again watch the silliest, most extreme version of what that might be like in the latest iteration of the Freaky Friday franchise, Freakier Friday. Starring a renovated Lindsay Lohan as Anna and an unrenovated but still sturdy Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess, this new story allows not one, but two corporeal exchanges, predictably resulting in more confusion (if not more fun). Maybe due to my advanced age (74)—when I saw the movie this week I seemed to be the oldest person in the theater by around 40 years—I found it difficult to remember which character had been displaced into which body. The Freakier mix-up occurs between the original mother/daughter characters, Tess and Anna, and Anna’s teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters) and Harper’s soon-to-be stepsister Lily (Sophia Hammons). The two kids, disliking each other with the kind of intensity only teenage girls can inspire, want to prevent their parents’ marriage, and this quartet finds themselves together on the eve (or it could be an entire week) before the wedding. This time, Anna body-swaps with her own daughter and Tess with her soon-to-be step-granddaughter. Are you with me? Good, because even after I saw the movie, I went home confused.
The duplicate mix-up was just one of the reasons I found the story hard to follow. I kept thinking 39-year-old Lohan was one of the teen characters, as her look—long hair, trendy outfits, completely unlined face—conveys enough youthfulness for her to easily be the sister of her daughter. So the idea that after the swap she was supposed to be embodying her daughter (geez, I think, yes, checked it, that’s right) slipped in and out of my understanding.
I had never thought before about how the growing confusion we’re subjected to around celebrities’ ages as a result of facial work might affect our ability to grasp the plot of a movie, or less critically, influence whether the casting makes sense. I found Tess’s unretouched face a comfort in this film: She was clearly one of the mothers, no matter who else was living in her body. But it was cold comfort amidst all this generational disorientation. When Anna’s old teenage crush (Chad Michael Murray) entered the scene, himself now crushing on her 60something mother-who-was-actually-her-soon-to-be-step-daughter, I was thrown into such a state of bafflement I actually got up to stand at the back of the theater for a while, hoping that would give me a clearer perspective (it did not).
Here’s a little thought experiment: Say you were watching a movie in which, as a result of some swizzling magic schtick, two people—a mother and daughter—exchanged bodies. The mother, played by Kris Jenner, the daughter, by Kim Kardashian. They take over one another’s lives, each one exasperated and incompetent at her new role. You see how the trope fizzles? (Can’t imagine it? No problem—you can actually see how the trope fizzles by checking out the Freaky spoof that 69-year-old Kris and another 40something daughter, Khloe, posted to Instagram last week.)
The best visual jokes in Freakier Friday involved Tess and Lily’s body swap, especially those showing the vain step-granddaughter’s desperate efforts to rescue herself from (what she perceives as) Tess’s degenerating physical form. “My face looks like a Birkin bag that’s been left out in the sun to rot!” cries Lily. A scene in a drugstore where she’s evidently applied something to her lips to make them fuller has Tess (as the step-granddaughter) hilariously pleased with her new trout mouth; she resembles a Real Housewife, ridiculous. Lily’s transformation from teen chic to sun-visor-and-glasses-on-a-chain-wearing granny-style is more quietly funny. But the physical difference between Anna and Harper is far less notable, making any visual jokes harder to pull off. In fact, in the opening scene of the movie, where Anna is playing guitar in her room wearing a large set of earphones, I momentarily thought she was the teen, which might’ve been a nod to the original Freaky Friday, but foreshadowed the movie’s identity issues.
Veering off for a moment about Anna’s former crush lusting after Tess: It was played as unbelievable, farcical, that a hot, younger guy would fall for a granny, in spite of her obviously well-groomed, even sexy character (60-something sexiness being manifested by abundant cleavage and self-composure). Which brings me to another confused issue: the film’s bevy of offensive jokes about old people.
I’d be the first to tell you that many of the things old people do can be funny. I just spent 10 minutes looking for my reading glasses, which were on my head (less tragic than when they were actually on my face). But I don’t believe even the most uncurious teenagers think people in their 60s lose all their teeth, wear adult diapers, or carry around a portable potty, as Lily believes. This kind of infantilization of olds is dumb and ageist. The audience I saw the movie with found it funny; I hope they were laughing at the cluelessness of it, rather than at the cliché.
Okay, veer over.
Back to what it means when every generation starts to look the same—at least on our screens. Freakier left me wondering just how much plastic surgery’s effects will influence what we see in the movies. Already there’s criticism about certain actors not looking like themselves, or suffering—as a result of neurotoxin—limited facial expression. Lohan, always pretty, now looks not only difficult to age-categorize, but perfect enough to be AI generated. In fact, I’m not sure I could swear to you that she wasn’t.
In a recent interview in The Guardian, Curtis herself shared harsh criticism of what she called the “cosmeceutical industrial complex” and what’s it done to many faces. “I believe we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance],” she said. “There’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances. And it is aided and abetted by AI.” Sitting, virtually, across from her interviewer, she continued, “I am not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that looks better.’ But what’s better? Better is fake.”
That’s undeniably true.
And I have another question: How much freakier will it get?
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