Lousy going on awful

Noel Vera

Gary Winick's "13 Going on 30" is about as witless, toothless,
humorless, and charmless a teenybopper comedy as any you might find
in the multiplex nowadays.

It's about thirteen-year-old Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen), who
finds her life friendless, loveless, and rotten, and wishes herself
30, whereupon she turns into Jennifer Garner complete with cleavage,
a gorgeous apartment, and a naked man in the shower. She runs around
feeling up her suddenly mature breasts (isn't there an entire sub-
genre of comedies about men magically turned into women that have
milked this joke to death?), looking up old boyfriends like Matt
(Mark Ruffalo, in a markedly fuzzier, less sharp performance than
the one he gave in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and
chumming with old girlfriends like Lucy (Judy Greer). She walks
briskly to work, reminding herself that she's a "big magazine
editor" and "a real bitch" (the movie could have used plenty more of
the latter quality); turns out the teen magazine she works for is
lagging in circulation behind their competitor, which manages to
somehow steal all their best ideas (Bravo, some topicality! Teen
magazines have really been in trouble of late, involved in vicious
struggles to distinguish themselves from their endless clones,
desperately trying to fathom the fickle tastes of the eight-to-
fifteen crowd by either reworking their image or, ultimately,
shutting down. Why this crisis should at all be a bad thing, though--
frankly, I think all teen magazines should be recycled into
something really useful, like toilet paper--the movie doesn't
explain very well). Things come to a crisis, Jenna learns the error
of her ways, and hey, presto change-o! Everything is back to normal.

The movie is essentially "Big" on estrogen, with Garner playing the
Tom Hanks role, the difference being that Hanks brought an exuberant
physicality to his child-trapped-in-an-adult's-body performance--
watching him, you really felt the disconnect between the character's
full-grown height and his loose-limbed, fleet-footed shenanigans as
he did something as simple as, say, cross a room (he was even
funnier when he spat out a spoonful of caviar, say, or brought a
woman up to his apartment for a sleepover); Garner, on the other
hand, has to wear out-of-fashion clothes and dance to '80s music to
remind us that she's not all that she seems. Mind you, I didn't
totally like "Big"--the message that "we lose something when we grow
up" is amusing when it's played for laughs, tiresome when it's meant
as serious drama--but that movie worked the situation out better
(Hanks has to literally shed his boy's clothes, his house, even his
family to begin his adult's life), and puts its hero in a more
precarious position (alone, homeless, penniless, suspected of
kidnapping a 13-year-old boy). Garner has an identity, and people
she knows and who knows her, she just happened to 'forget' the
intervening seventeen years.

Actually, that would have been the more interesting angle: what if
it was temporary amnesia, and she only thinks she had jumped from 13
to 30? The climax would have involved her regaining her memory, as
well as memories of every rotten thing she did to get where she is
now--I would have loved to have seen all that bitchiness presented
onscreen in, say two or three short minutes. It would have driven
home the fact that, as is said at one point in the picture, "you
can't go back again" (you can't, not unless you're starring in one
of these movies), and that some things, when done, cannot be undone.
Another time-traveling, age-switching movie this one might have
taken its cues from (or should have, anyway), is Francis
Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married"--there, Peggy Sue (Kathleen
Turner, in one of her more thoughtful roles) learns that no matter
how she may struggle and scheme, she can't avoid her destiny; she
can only accept it with a wiser, sadder state of mind. Garner's
character could use a lesson or two on inevitability, instead of
putting her faith on total makeovers.

I suppose the filmmakers were afraid that that kind of thinking
might upset the teenyboppers. The movie is light on exploring the
psychological and physical possibilities presented by the premise
(what would a thirteen-year-old in a thirty-year-old's body really
say and do?), but long on mining cheap "fish-out-of-water" or "girl
out of time" jokes, not all of them fresh; the high point of the
film (such as there is) is Garner trying to jumpstart a party to
life by striding into the middle of the dance floor and lurching to
the tune of Michael Jackson's horrifically dated "Thriller"--a
sequence, incidentally, lifted from Hanks' and Robert Loggia's
lovely "Heart and Soul" dance on the giant piano keys in "Big."

As Jenna's mom, the terrific Kathy Baker ("Street Smart," "Edward
Scissorhands," "Cold Mountain," the TV show "Picket Fences") is
criminally underused; as Jenna's grown-up boyfriend Mark Ruffalo, as
noted, has done better work elsewhere. Garner as Jenna shows little
of the physical dexterity she's known for in her TV show "Alias," or
in her role as Elektra in "Daredevil," though you might want to
applaud her sheer courage in shuffling zombie-style to the sounds of
Michael Jackson's wailing--before an audience, at that; might as
well mention that Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a similar character in
the otherwise unremarkable "Freaky Friday," was much more appealing
in her attack (maybe because she manages to better capture the
hormonally-fueled, pratfalling goofiness of girls at that age). The
dialogue, by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa, seems to have the
language of magazine editors down pat, though on the other hand they
have little feel for the way young teens express themselves, much
less think; Gary Winick directs the movie as if he were a thirteen-
year-old trapped in the body of a thirty-three-year-old. Which is
how you'd probably feel, if you actually tried to watch this movie.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/17/04)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)