director
Gary Winick
screenwriters
Cathy Yuspa
Josh Goldsmith
producers
Susan Arnold
Gina Matthews
Donna Arkoff Roth
cinematographer
Don Burgess
music
Theodore Shapiro
editor
Susan Littenberg
cast
Jennifer Garner (Jenna Rink)
Mark Ruffalo (Matt Flamhaff)
Kathy Baker (Beverly Rink)
Judy Greer (Lucy)
Andy Serkis (Richard)
Lynn Collins (Wendy)
Shana Dowdeswell (Young Jenna)
Jack Salvatore Jr. (Young Matt)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 100m
u.s.
release: April 23,
2004
video
availability: TBA
official website
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Jennifer Garner, for all I
know, may have demonstrated a deft comic touch in her many guises
on the popular spy show Alias (haven't seen it, wouldn't
know). In movies, she has typically been employed as the hottie-in-residence;
her biggest prior role was the athletic assassin Elektra in Daredevil.
But in 13 Going on 30, her first starring vehicle, Garner
comes into her own as a spirited light comedienne. The story
is essentially a distaff Big, with a few alterations,
but it's a friendly, giggly movie, closer in tone to Romy
and Michele's High School Reunion and the other '80s-flavored
comedies of the late '90s. I saw girls leaving the screening
who weren't even born yet when "Love Is a Battlefield,"
one of the film's central nostalgia trips, was big. Made me feel
old.
Garner's character, Jenna,
feels old, too. In 1987, her teenage self (played by Shana Dowdeswell),
in the midst of a hellish thirteenth birthday, wishes she were
thirty (she's seen a magazine article declaring that thirtysomethings
have more fun). Sprinkled with some magic "wishing dust,"
Jenna wakes up in 2004, in an adult body, and in the bed she
sometimes shares with a hockey player. It's as if Jenna is transported
seventeen years into the future, without any knowledge of how
she came to be there -- how'd she get to be a magazine editor,
for instance? Since Jenna is thirty on the outside and thirteen
on the inside, her situation has many levels of disorientation.
After some fumbling, though, she deals with it.
Those of us who were actually
there will note that the film's '80s soundtrack is a bit out
of sync: In 1987, both "Love Is a Battlefield" and
Jenna's other big number, Michael Jackson's "Thriller,"
were so five years ago, and when Jenna's best friend Matt
plays a Talking Heads tune and no one recognizes it, you wonder
where they've been -- it's "Burning Down the House,"
man. Still, the scene in which grown-up Jenna livens a dull party
by requesting "Thriller," happily leading a bunch of
thirtysomethings in the goofily iconic zombie dance, ranks right
up there with Cameron Diaz's bubbly white-girl moves to "Baby
Got Back" in the first Charlie's
Angels. A radiant woman looking like she's having the
time of her life makes up for a lot of inconsistencies in both
soundtrack and narrative.
Jenna runs into the grown Matt
(Mark Ruffalo), now a photographer, and for a while the movie
goes a little soft. The script brings up the issue of how Jenna
had been behaving up until her teen self claimed her body, and
the picture isn't pretty; we also learn that she was cruel to
Matt back in '87, and that they haven't spoken in years. Mark
Ruffalo knows he's the standard-issue Nonthreatening Male here
(he probably agreed to it to avoid being typecast as the Threatening
Male after In
the Cut), but he comes at the romance sideways, crablike,
suspicious of Jenna's motives after all this time but warming
to her slowly, and Garner, playing off his reticence, gets to
play teenage yearning quite becomingly.
The scenes at Jenna's magazine
office (with a de-Gollumized Andy Serkis in fine harried form
as her editor-in-chief) fall just this side of persuasive; I'm
not convinced, as the script apparently is, that Jenna's aw-shucks
concept for the magazine's redesign would go over so huge with
her supervisors, nor that a rival mag would find it hot enough
to steal. But 13 Going on 30 isn't about that, anyway;
it's about a thirty-year-old bouncing on a bed to Pat Benatar
and confiding to a group of thirteen-year-olds about boys, or
eating ice cream and happily sharing it with a dog in the park,
or going to visit Matt on his wedding day and weeping as she
holds the gift he gave her on her thirteenth birthday. Mainly,
it's about Jennifer Garner redesigning herself for romantic comedy,
for which, I now know, she has a natural affinity.
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