Romancefest 2016: 13 Going on 30

Gary Winick's 2004 flick 13 GOING ON 30 starts off promisingly enough with a flashback to the lives of 1980s middle-schoolers, awkward but fun Christa B. Allen and her best bud and next door neighbor, the nerdy but sweet Sean Marquette. An attempt to impress the popular girls (led by Alexandra Kyle) at her 13th birthday party ends in humiliation and Allen takes out her frustrations on Marquette.

She wishes her awkward adolescence was over and that she could skip right to being 30. And since this is a movie, there's a little magic, and she wakes up as Jennifer Garner, having skipped her awkward adolescence and arrived as a fully successful and glamorous fashion magazine editor in New York City.

Now you might be wondering what 13-year-old would want to skip to the age of 30. When I was 13 I would have thought 30 was too old, and if I wished for anything it would have been to be maybe 21. I figured by then I would have already won an Oscar. After all, 21 was so far off. 30 was unthinkable. Where would I be then? I dunno. Married with kids? Early retirement?

Anyway, I'm 35 now and realize I had no idea what I was talking about when I was 13. In the movie, our heroine bases her wish on an article in the magazine she'll soon be running, about someone who is fabulous, flirty and 30. So, I think it's just a contrivance to have a catchy title, and we just have to accept that 30 sounds glamorous to a 13-year-old instead of the age cutoff for how old people you trust are allowed to be.

Now I've overthought it. The point is, Jennifer Garner has to adjust to her new life as a 30-year-old success. This isn't like BIG where Hanks literally just got an adult body. In this flick, she's still herself, she's just missed the intervening years, somehow, and has arrived fully, uh, developed. She's pleased with her boobs and her career, but less pleased with some of the things she learns about herself. She's become kind of a cut throat business woman who is quick to turn on friends and has a distant relationship with her parents. This doesn't seem right to her, so she seeks out her childhood buddy, who has grown up to be the awesome Mark Ruffalo.

If you ever want to cast someone where I'll totally understand why the woman is falling in love with him, cast Mark Ruffalo. He just seems so sweet and cool. He's a little put off since apparently Garner actually ended up becoming popular in the latter half of middle school and the rest of high school, and grew apart from young Ruffalo, ignoring him for the rest of their teen years. So he's not sure why she's coming to him now, and is a little hesitant, especially considering he now has his own life and relationship.

In her new life, Garner has surpassed the leader of the popular girls (Judy Greer as an adult) who is now her scheming underling.

Garner is great at playing the awkward teen in a grown woman's body, and very convincingly embodies the part without going into outright slapstick territory. There's definitely physical comedy here, and it's well played, but it's not like in that Radcliffe movie I watched earlier this month where people fall out of windows and stuff. Garner's just appropriately gangly and goofy, and for once it is endearing, since there's a built-in reason for it in the premise of the movie, and not just a cliched klutz.

The movie starts to wear out its welcome near the end as it gets past all the fun premise and build up stuff and moves into the part where it has to tick off the romantic comedy plot points. It never really comes to terms with the implications of what it would really mean for an adult man to fall in love with a 13-year-old in a grown woman's body, but I guess that can be explained away by magic, to a certain extent. In any case, at least most of the movie is fun and light hearted.