Ray Pride

Ah, bubblegum that holds its snap.

"13 Going On 30," despite resemblances to many, many movies that have come before, is the kind of flawed but effervescent romantic comedy that soars on the chemistry of its central duo, Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo. They're sublimely dorky together.

In a suburban house on her thirteenth birthday in 1987, a girl named Jenna Rink dreams of a life in New York, culled from the pages of her favorite magazine, a post-teen rag called Poise. Someday, she hopes, she'll be like one of the slick's headlines: "30, and flirty and thriving." A little bit of wishing dust, a bump of the head, and she wakes up in modern-day Manhattan, an editor of the very same Poise. And it's just like high school, except with car service.

Garner plays the grown-up Jenna with a 13-year-old's gangly, adolescent mayhem in her "Alias"-toned body. Jenna acts out like a confused but eager puppy for whom the world is made up of only things to chase, of air to leap up and down in. But her co-workers think she's mad: it turns out the grownup Jenna is a cruel, shallow, selfish person nothing like the eager one now inhabiting her body. She meets up again with her best male friend, Matt Flamhaff, a geeky kid who's grown up to be Mark Ruffalo. He remembers her meanness, even if Jenna doesn't.

The weird premise has dark undercurrents, but what matters mostly is the charm of the performances and the marshaling of dimples, including the invaluable Judy Greer as her cynical best friend and co-worker and Andy Serkis (yes, Gollum) as their editor. Get past that prevailing critical canard, the "it's not groundbreaking" insistence on novelty, and it's a delight.

Take, for instance, a musical number that's shot in an exceptionally casual fashion, when Jenna incites a bored room of jaded New Yorkers into dancing to a dumb song from their youth. Director Gary Winick doesn't push it as far as he might, but the moment's tingly. Much like her first glimpse of her adult shoe closet or when she inhales a second pina colada too many.

"13 Going On 30" is the seventh feature from the 43-year-old director, coming right after "Tadpole"--"this film I did that did well at Sundance." He's a producer as well, whose company InDigEnt is responsible for such movies as "Pieces of April" and Wim Wenders' upcoming "Land of Plenty."

"I was offered a lot of romantic comedies and I was wanting to do a Hollywood film, but feeling that if I could do a romantic comedy that was about something, I could do a better job," the stop-and-start talker tells me. "It really wasn't the body-switching that appealed to me, but that it was about a character who desperately wanted something that she thought would make her happy, and getting it, realizes that's not the person she wants, thanks to the conceit of the movie, she gets a chance to do it over again.

"I'd like to take any film that I do," he continues, "and elevate it with honesty and emotions and relationships. Nils Mueller [the friend and screenwriter of `Tadpole'] who I work with all the time got to rewrite it in a way that I hope heightens that. I think the producers, Revolution Studios, were a little afraid that, uh-oh, I was going to turn this into kind of an art film, and my response to that is, `You couldn't turn this into an art film even if you tried!'"

He didn't know Garner's work. "They sent me a couple of tapes of `Alias' and... I kind of didn't get that show," Winick says. "Clearly, she's a great dramatic actress," he enthuses, "but I didn't know if she was a comedic actress, that was totally a leap of faith. There was a mutual friend of ours who also said she was funny, which doesn't mean you're a comic genius, but once I met Jennifer, and we laughed a little bit, I'm like, `Great, this is gonna be a great thing.'"

The contortions of the plot settle nicely, despite a resemblance to the contrivances of the baleful "The Butterfly Effect." "When Nils came up with the wishing dust, that was a big whew. I mean, look, Billy Wilder says `Every film starts with a coincidence.' This one starts with a huge coincidence! The nice thing is that the actual bones of the movie were in place. Thirteen gets her wish, finds out she doesn't like who she is and gets to go back and do it over again. The plots are easy on these kinds of films, because it's the same plot in every movie!" He laughs.

Robert Zemeckis' customary cameraman, Don Burgess, gives the New York exteriors an admirable polish, unlike the mini-DV murk depicting the great locations in "Tadpole." Winick also says he had the trust of studio head Joe Roth after successful previews, and was allowed to reshoot the beginning and ending to make the story stronger. "I shot for another nine days," he says, a luxury lifelong New Yorker Woody Allen once had but no longer is offered.

"I know, see, I'm the new Wood--" He stops himself from saying even one more word, with the biggest grin.

We laugh. "Or not!"

"Thirteen Going on Thirty" opens Friday.

(2004-04-22)

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Tip of the Week
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