13 Going On 30

13 Going on 30, is the story of the young and then older Jenna Rink. Jenna is a pretty typical 1987 adolescent, coming complete with obsessions with Rick Springfield, Pat Benatar and the Michael Jackson video Thriller. She attends Junior High with her sweetly enamored best friend, Matt, and the six chicks (the gaggle of girls who claim the throne of being the school’s most popular).

Even at thirteen Jenna dreams of a better life for herself. She obsessively reads Poise (a women’s fashion magazine) fantasizes about becoming the seventh six chick (something her best friend Matt explains is mathematically impossible) and anxiously awaits physical maturity, adding tissue paper in certain areas where that maturity seems to be lagging.

Jenna dreams of achieving adulthood insisting to her mother, “that your thirties are the best years of your life.” She tells her mother she wants to be, “thirty, flirty and thriving.” Add a particularly dramatizing birthday, with a little magic dust, and Jenna awakens to find that she’s become just that. Jenna awakens to find herself not only grown up, but fast forwarded seventeen years in her own life to where she is now an editor at Poise, dating a New York Ranger and maintaining a fifth avenue apartment.

There seems to be a certain post feminist ethos in everything Jenna has achieved as she remarks to Matt (after finding that his baby fat has now transformed into the broodishness of Mark Ruffalo) “I’ve got everything I ever wanted.”

“So enjoy it,” Matt casually encourages her, despite being thrown at her re-emergence after a seventeen-year absence from his life. For a while, Jenna is able to do just that. She attends high profile publicity parties for her magazine, “on a school night,” (an event she saves by doing the Zombie dance from Thriller) and revels in her job and high fashion wardrobe.

Slowly however it begins to dawn on Jenna the kind of person she has had to become to achieve this success. Her friendships are based in superficial one upmanship, and her romantic entanglements only look good without the volume. The more Jenna learns about herself the more she desperately she clutches onto the things she knew as a child.

This seems to be the driving statement behind 13 Going on 30, which is to suggest that happiness depends on a certain lack of adult sophistication. The more Jenna embraces the things she knew as a child the more successful she becomes (Matt, her parents, her high school year book). While turning away only leads her to isolation and emotional bankruptcy.

Jennifer Garner wonderfully portrays this crash course in adult angst. Her excitement and pure verve on the screen make the movie more engaging then it deserves to be. Her most memorable moment probably comes when she re-enacts the Thriller dance, and prods Matt and everyone else to join in. Her lack of self-consciousness and pure enjoyment make it perhaps the most memorable scene from a film so far this year.

Director Gary Winick (Tadpole) plays with cliche not by avoiding it, but by knowing how to give the audience exactly what they want from it. He gives the film a breezy airiness that so many romantic comedies aim for, yet so few achieve. Winick is able to twist a rather predictable script into something, not exactly unexpected, but nonetheless refreshing.

by Dave Fults