13 Going on 30 Movie Review

13 Going on 30 is a one-woman show and the show appears to be the long-play version of the opening of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (where she tossed her hat in the air). That the one-woman is Jennifer Garner makes this an effervescent, if not very substantial production. That girl is going to make it after all.

Garner plays Jenna Rink, but not at the start of the movie. Christa B. Allen plays the 13-year old Jenna. She lives in the year 1987, and is full of pre-teen insecurities and desperately wants to fit in. On her birthday she invites the "Six Chicks," a pack of rotten-mean popular girls (because popular girls are always rotten-mean in movies) to her birthday party. She also invites the hot boy of the class and her dorky next-door-neighbor and best friend, Matt (Jack Salvatore Jr.), which leads to a situation where Jenna is humiliated and wishing that she was "30 and flirty."

Wham, she wakes up as Jennifer Garner in her New York apartment and the movie starts to show some of the life hinted at in the trailer. It's somehow present day and Jenna discovers she's everything she wished for back in 1987. She's had a fabulous life that she doesn't remember; she was Prom Queen and became a member of the "Six Chicks." She's now an editor of her favorite fashion magazine, Poise, and her co-workers and subordinates fear her. The only downer notes are that the rival magazine has been scooping them month in, month out and Poise is on the brink of being shuttered. Jenna also finds out she's estranged from her parents and from Matt, whom she promptly looks up. Matt (played by Mark Rufalo, who looks to be having the most fun he's had in eons) tells her that they stopped being friends the day of her 13th birthday and he hasn't seen her since high school. Jenna has to prove to Matt that she's not a harpy and turn around a magazine using only the mentality of a 13-year old and the body of Jennifer Garner. This is, of course, a pretty formidable combination.

Much like Family Man, which was more successful (as a whole) and more serious, 13 fudges by letting the character have a previous life and history that they're entirely unaware of, an alternate universe—and an alternate them-- that teaches them something about the choices that alternate self made. But 13 is also much more concerned with being entertaining, though it attempts to address the issues of the changes of maturing.

Some things are too easily dispensed with. When Jenna first awakes as an adult one expects her to scamper home to her mother and father. They're conveniently on a Caribbean cruise. Instead of heading home (we discover later she has a key) and waiting for them to arrive she plunges right into her job, doing slapstick at board meetings and pratfalls in her apartment (that 13 year old can sure run in high heels!). As we're already faced with the perplexing issues of understanding the history of the future, mean Jenna, the one whose body the sweet Jenna now inhabits, it would have been smart for director Gary Winnick and screenwriters Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith to have had her act in a way that a stranger in a strange land would act. Instead she's promptly doing choreographed versions of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and Pat Benatar's "Love Is a Battlefied." This stuff is cute, but it doesn't help us buy into their premise or suspend our disbelief.

Winnick's not asking this movie to have the bitter-sweet gravitas of Penny Marshall's Big or of Brett Ratner's The Family Man. In doing so he creates a frothier film, and a wonderful spotlight for Garner, but he scuttles the chances for making something more lasting, something this film had a very real shot at.