I’ll be honest. When I follow characters from my childhood into a new chapter, It sometimes takes me a while to invest in new families or social circles they have built since I last saw them. This was true when I saw Freakier Friday this week. Spoiler alert: by the end, I was on board with the continued story my favorite characters were telling.
The opening scene was everything I could have hoped for: Anna Coleman playing her guitar for a crowd, dressed like the rock star she is–all revealed to be a fantasy when we cut to Anna in her bedroom, playing the guitar for herself with her headphones plugged in. “Give the people what they want,” I thought. This was the perfect way to start the film.
Anna’s Psychiatrist mom Tess Coleman is attempting to record a podcast (who isn’t?), even as her husband Ryan noisily gets ready nearby. her family is clearly her top priority, as seen by her insistence on participating in her granddaughter’s school drop-off that morning.
Harper Coleman is a sassy surfer chick who cares about the environment. Anna’s fiancé, Eric, is a lovely British chef whose daughter, Lily, is the snooty girl we love to hate. I wish we saw more of Anna and Eric’s romance leading up to their engagement; we just get snapshots (literally). But alas, we’ve got body-switching to get to.
Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mark harmon, Julia Butters, Manny Jacinto, and Sophia Hammons earnestly portray these characters who are struggling to bring two families together. They are each torn between their own wishes and what would be best for this new family as a whole.
Watching Freakier Friday, I laughed, I smiled, I gleefully listened to Pink Slip… I waited patiently to see Chad Michael Murray return as Jake and Ryan Malgarini arrive as little brother Harry.
rewatching Freaky Friday before going to the theater, I felt emotional about the decades I’ve spent with the 2000s remake. In the wedding rehearsal speech of the ’03 film, Tess (Well, Anna in Tess’ body) tearfully expresses Anna’s feelings: “No one could ever take the place of her dad because he was a really great dad. but somebody could be part of a new family, its own kind of cool, new little unit.”
This speech feels especially relevant in welcoming new characters into the Freaky Friday family. Sure, I wanted more chad/Jake. I wanted more of Harry the little brother. But I do think Jake got a fitting ending. And maybe Harry is too grown up to dance on a table or run around with underwear on his head like he did in 2003.
Anna has a “cool, new little unit” of her own now, with a daughter who loves her deeply, a stepdaughter who realizes she wants a family to love, a fiancé who makes a difficult decision for the wellbeing of others, and a mom who has been by her side all along.
The challenges of mothers and daughters are timeless, yet the specifics evolve with time and circumstance. For nearly 50 years, almost every decade has had some version of Mary Rodgers’ 1972 Freaky Friday story, either for the big screen or small. Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris in 1976, Gaby Hoffman and Shelley Long in 1995, Lohan and Curtis in 2003, and Cozi Zuehlsdorff and Heidi Blickenstaff in 2018.
the legacy is more than Lohan and Curtis; however, it is their movie from the 2000s that provided the basis for a 2020s intergenerational body-switching tale. Their specific Legacy sequel spawned another legacy sequel. Their magic carries this universe forward.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, so the Freaky Friday story that I think means the most to me is the one that I saw in the theater 22 years ago with my mom and sister. Nostalgia is corporatized, and it’s easy to gloss over the meat of it. I look at this Freakier Friday moment and find that the release singlehandedly drove me back to the 2003 film and to some deeper feeling of what it meant to grow up in the specific time and social context that I did.
I’m glad that Disney paid homage to that feeling in so many of us, and that Freakier Friday simultaneously is a story that can speak to today’s mothers, grandmothers, and teenagers. Go see Freakier Friday, sing along with Christina Vidal on “Take Me Away,” and remind yourself that 2003 you should be proud that we all made it here, somehow… perhaps with the help of a family.
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