In my free time, such as it is, I'm slowly working my way through the single season of the short-lived NBC comedy Freaks and Geeks. It's arduous going because, as much as I love the show, I frequently have to take long pauses to step away from the DVDs and clear things from my head. The series, which naturally struck out with mainstream viewers, perfectly nails the painful complexity of why being a teenager is so awful and yet why the events of our teenage years are so successful in shaping our adult personalities.
I bring this up because in a perfect world, I'd have watched 13 Going on 30 in similar bursts, taking long pauses to clear my head. I wouldn't be dealing with how spot-on the movie is, but instead I'd be marveling over how writers Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa have so simplified the confusion of youth that I could look to a Sweet Valley High book for more complicated shading.
In the late 1980s, of course, there was a spate of body-switching comedies. George Burns and Charlie Schlatter got mixed up in 18 Again! and Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore did the switcheroo in Like Father, Like Son and Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold got mixed up in Vice Versa. Heck, even Alec Baldwin and an old guy did some magic in Prelude to a Kiss. The genre's undeniable king, though, is the Tom Hanks masterpiece, Big, which is fueled by a Gary Ross script that manages to mix farce and deep human insecurity in an incomparable way.
13 Going on 30 is to Big what 50 First Dates is to Groundhog Day, that is to say a carbon copy vehicle that keeps the basic structure, but fails to connect any of the dots with any grace or originality. At least 13 Going on 30 isn't the demented mindf*ck that 50 First Dates ultimately becomes.
What it finally is, though, is a one-trick pony, a movie worth seeing for one reason and one reason only. The incomparable Jennifer Garner, available for free every Sunday night at 9 p.m. on Alias, invests 13 Going on 30 with a spark that it in no way deserves. The fact that the movie couldn't exist at all without her (and certainly would have failed with any other actress) ought to suggest that perhaps it needed a few more drafts. There's gotta be more to a body switching movie than "If I'd known then what I know now, everything would be different." That, however, is all that Goldsmith and Yuspa have given director Gary Winick (Tadpole) to work with.
Jenna Rink (Christa Allen) is a normal 13-year-old girl. That is to say that she's a little bit geeky, a little bit awkward and more-than-a-little-bit uncomfortable in her body. She also has a somewhat distorted sense of popular culture. It's 1987 and while many girls her age might be wasting their time on the music and style that were currently in vogue, Jenna is already living several years in the past. She's all about "Jesse's Girl," "Thriller" and "Love is a Battlefield." I'm not going to say anything about who a 13-year-old girl growing up in 1987 should be listening to, but heaven knows a little Bon Jovi would have made a lot more sense.
Jenna has a good friend in slight chubby Matt (Jack Salvatore), but what she really craves is to be part of the Six Chicks, a popular clique led by Tom-Tom (Alexandra Pyle), a mean girl who really just wants Jenna to do her homework. Jenna's fine with that, because she doesn't like being different. She desperately wants to conform. We know that not because we read the subtext or we understand the genre, because because Jenna explicitly says so.
So it's Jenna's 13th birthday and she's fed up. An avid reader of Poise magazine, she sees an article titled "30, Flirting and Thriving" and misunderstands the article's title to mean that 30 should be her ultimate aspiration. After a party disaster involving that inevitable horror ritual of "7 Minutes in Heaven," Jenna hides in the closet and accidentally gets sprinkled with store-bought magic wishing dust.
Poof.
The next morning, she wakes up in a posh New York apartment that she shouldn't be able to afford. Suddenly, she is, indeed, 30 and, to her great delight, she's become Jennifer Garner. She's fascinated with how her face has developed, but she's really fascinated with how her breasts have developed. Quick comparison with Big: If you'll recall, the first think Tom Hanks' character does is glance in his jockey shorts, however he doesn't spend 10 minutes walking around grabbing his crotch in glee. Since breast development is, apparently, more central to female psychological development (which is obviously true), Jenna wanders around clutching her boobs for a long period of time.
Anyway, she's happy with the apartment and her body and really scared by the naked man in her shower who greets her with sexual terms of endearment. She rushes out of the house to discover that she's not colleagues with Tom-Tom, who has grown into Lucy (Judy Greer) and she works as an editor at Poise under a fey editor (Andy Serkis). The magazine is having circulation problems, but Jenna is more disturbed to discover that she hasn't grown into a very nice woman. Sure, she's friends with Madonna and gets to go to fun parties in limos, but she also sleeps with married men, doesn't talk to her parts and apparently engages in sketchy business practices. Oh, and she also doesn't talk to Matty (Mark Rufalo), now a much slimmer photographer living in The Village.
The body-switching genre requires only limited mechanics in its wish-fulfillment premise. It can required accursed Tabasco sauce, a car accident, a fortune cookie or a Zoltar machine. But even by genre standards, 13 Going on 30 is flimsy. The wishing dust has no reason for being there and no reason for working and then the actual transformation is just strange and awkward. It very quickly becomes evident that this isn't going to be a situation where Jenna has to convince everybody that she's really her 13-year-old self trapped in her grown-up body. Nobody believes her. Nobody cares. They all just accept that it's not literal, it's a metaphor of some sort. Her general sense of dislocation is confusing because it's unclear how she can undo her predicament and it's even less certain if she really wants to.
What the movie seems to lack is an objective. Although her new life has road bumps, Jenna doesn't seem to want to go back. She mostly just seems to be content being a kid trapped in her new body. In order to impose a structure on things, the film's writers have included a key subplot about the need to redesign Poise magazine, but everything Jenna knows about magazine editing she learned from Magazine Editing for Dummies (no, really) and it shows. It's a stupid angle to build the movie around, but even by that standard, Jenna's ultimate attempt to fix her magazine is absurd. Her renewed youthful enthusiasm has no actual application in her 30-year-old life. It makes her more appealing to the secretaries and to the 13-year-old who lives in her building, but it absolutely crushes her ability to operate as a gifted professional woman. Is that the message of the movie? Because in Big, Tom Hanks found a place in the world where he could parlay his strengths as a boy trapped in a man's body into big bucks. Jenna merely discovers that you have to be a conniving biach and a bit of a slut to succeed in the big city and that in the process, you also run the risk of losing the man you really love. The lesson I learned from 13 Going on 30 is that conformity may make you into the Homecoming Queen and it may make you totally rich and totally successful and it may make all your dreams come true in the Big City, but those are the wrong dreams to have, you really want to continue to live in the suburbs, marry your sweetheart and remain close to your parents.
How endearingly post-feminist, I guess? From the opening credits to Jenna's Converse in the film's final shot, 13 Going on 30 is a movie that's all about pink girlishness. The movie lacks any sense that it's possible to grow into a woman and be intelligent, strong, and yet feminine. It implies strongly that the values held by your average teenage girl are values worth holding onto with a death grip. It's a very strange and awfully regressive ideology. Old 30-year-old Jenna (who we never see, for good reason) was an unappealing ball-breaker and a sycophant, but she also was a 30-year-old on the verge of taking over a magazine with a national circulation. New 30-year-old Jenna likes to try on dresses, giggle, dance and play in the park. Is it any wonder people like her more?
Winick, whose last film was Tadpole, a indie drama that got huge buzz and then tanked at the box office. Working with Robert Zemekis' regular cinematographer Don Burgess, Winick is at least able to make 13 Going on 30 look more aesthetically pleasing than his last muddle digital video effort. The movie offers a boring and familiar glimpse at New York City, but at least it seems to have been filmed in New York (at least partially). Winick has a good grasp of pacing in the film's funniest scenes, but when drama is required, everything slows to a crawl. That means that the film's middle 45 minutes speed by. The first 15 minutes and the last 30 minutes are often painful as Winick seems convinced that slowly pulling back from characters looking mournful is a sure path to emotional resonance. He's a bit off the mark. Also, as so often happens in slightly films of this nature, Winick just can't resist one musical montage after another. Considering that the montages are mixed in with two different dance sequences, that means that an awful lot of the movie is being pushed forward by music.
That's a lie and I know it. The movie is being pushed forward by Jennifer Garner, who Alias fans know as television's butt-kicking Meryl Streep. Every week, Garner's Sydney Bristow dons a new costume and a new accent and gets to punch and kick her way through a series of plots too confusing to explain. What I'm saying is that this is child's play for Garner.
I can't think of a comparably physically gifted actress since, perhaps, Sigourney Weaver in her heyday. Sometimes Jamie Lee Curtis is in that class. Catherine Zeta-Jones has occasionally shown glimpses of similar skills. Regardless, no other actress that I can imagine could have made 13 Going on 30 work, because none of the laughs come from anything in the page. It's Garner's wide-eyed, entirely open performance that produces the film's funny moments.
Garner gives herself over entirely to the role, modifying her vocal tone, her speech patterns and, most particularly her walk and her use of her body. She's willing to submit entirely to a number of pratfalls and more obvious gags, but what's more impressive is how naturally she captures the casual physical indifference of a prepubescent girl who has yet to give herself over to a new body. It's impossible not to smile at the joy that she takes in, say, a limo ride or her ability to fill out a stylish dress. She's not even slightly believable when she's required to suddenly become a proactive magazine editor, but that's 100% the fault of the script. With a more plausible story arc, Garner could certainly have made the transformation.
What Garner keeps being able to play so perfectly is the stunning woman who doesn't know how stunning she is. If her performance is nearly as successful as Tom Hanks' Big work, it's because the writers have given her so many nearly identical situations. At a big party thrown by her magazine (for reasons that are completely unclear), she gets to do several [less-funny] variations on Hanks' baby-corn and caviar tricks and the creative team is certain that her dance to "Thriller" is supposed to be her version of Hanks' "Heart and Soul" piano dance. It's not nearly as magical, though, because of how spontaneous it felt when Hanks and Robert Loggia showed their skills on the FAO Schwartz keyboard. Jenna's "Thriller" dance was already teased early in the movie, so there's simple no sense of discovery.
I guess I wish that Jenna had had more opportunities for personal discovery in general. With the exception of a five-minute scene where she returns home to repair her relationship with her parents, the performance lacks the loneliness that made Hanks' character so interesting. Her sexuality is also only played for humor, while Hanks' character in Big underwent a learning process leading to the actual consummation of a relationship. A darker, more complicated and also more interesting movie could have covered endless terrain. If Judy Blume had written the movie, for example, we could have seen how Jenna would have dealt with her first period at the age of 30.
The rest of the cast is just in the background. Ruffalo does interesting work, because he has to work his way through the fact that in the intervening 17 years, he grew to dislike what Jenna became. He has to figure out how to fall back in love with a Jenna he doesn't know anymore. He's saddled, though, with a weather woman fiance who has no place in the movie at all. He's less bland that Garner's TV co-star Michael Vartan, but it's unclear if there are any real sparks between them.
Judy Greer has the right sarcastic edge to be more interesting in a darker take on the movie. Not enough people know Greer, but given the right material, she has the potential to be a television star.
Lord of the Rings fans will be happy to see Andy Serkis working, though it's a bit disappointing that he's being cast as the Rowan Atkinson of his generation. This is especially true since Serkis and Atkinson are of roughly the same generation, which suggests that there won't be enough parts for the both of them. He's actually the best part of the "Thriller" scene, because it lets him remind viewers of his own physical gifts.
Jennifer Garner is nearly enough of a reason for me to give this movie one of my rare 2.5 star recommendations, but it's just not enough. She's spectacularly fun to watch, but I can't recommend the movie around her sufficiently. There’s no doubt that people who lack my picky nature will find great temporary glee in this movie. I’ll keep waiting for the body-switching movie by some of the Freaks and Geeks writers.
[Well, it's been a long time since I've written, but apparently my willingness to write three or four times what's necessary on simplistic movies remains unabated!]
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