Before Freakier Friday there were the two film versions of Freaky Friday based on Mary Rodgers’s lively, perceptive 1972 Young Adult novel, the foremother of all body-swap movie comedies (including Big).
In Rodgers’s story, a feuding mother and daughter magically switch bodies for a day. The author was absolutely aware of this ingenious setup’s queasy-comic possibilities. Her 13-year-old narrator seethes at not being allowed to attend boy-girl parties that feature “kissing games”, and struggles when her child-mind is cast into her mother’s adult body and is forced to deal with responsibilities. Dressed up in her mom’s sleekest 1970s working-lady pantsuit, the girl is startled, then outraged, when a man on the street leers at her.
Disney’s 1976 Freaky Friday was lighthearted fun, notable mainly because its co-star, 13-year-old Jodie Foster, made it the same year she played the child prostitute at the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. (Pictured below: Julia Butters, Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Sophia Hammons)
In the 2003 Freaky update, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan squared off as Tess and Anna Coleman, who seem, at first, barely acquainted – a mother and daughter so opposite in temperaments that they cannot help tormenting each other. That Tess, a widowed, hard-working therapist, is on the verge of re-marriage (with rebellious Anna none too keen on the prospect) added a perverse fizz to their predicament.
For Lohan, whose hyperdrive adolescence fuelled a million paparazzi creepshots, such catcalls became an uncomfortable reality. Superlative in The Parent Trap and Mean Girls, Lohan seemed poised to enjoy a fruitful grown-up career, but in the early oughts was far more famous as a tabloid target. While making Georgia Rule opposite Jane Fonda, Lohan failed to show up for work. (One of the film's producers released an open letter scolding Lohan as being “spoiled” and “unprofessional,” as though that was supposed to be help.)
Whatever Lohan’s gone through since then, she makes a seemingly effortless return to the big screen – the only thing missing are her signature freckles. For a while, Freakier Friday coasts by on the two stars’ evident affection for each other. Curtis, as always, is game to try anything, including self-humiliation, for a laugh. “My face looks likes like a Birkin bag that’s been left out in the sun to rot,” wails Tess in the first of many gags about how disgusting it is to be old.
This time around, the body-switching spell is cast three ways, then four, with Anna’s twentyish daughter Lily (Julia Butters) and soon-to-be stepdaughter (Sophia Hammons) pulled into the farcical mix.
The four actresses display plenty of wit as they impersonate each other, but there are only so many times that a woman (or girl) can clap eyes on her reflection, gasp in horror, or trip and fall off her high heels. Happily, though, Freakier and its jumbled-up heroines – especially Lohan – end up standing tall.
