Awkward adolescents dream to be mature and confident "grown-ups." Weary adults long to be naive and free of worry.
In 1988's "Big," Tom Hanks played the adult version of a young boy whose only wish was to be an adult. In 2004, Jennifer Garner plays a 30-year-old who had the same wish.
"13 Going On 30," a romantic comedy about love and growing up, successfully finds its way to a piece of the viewer's heart that has been neglected since the day of high school graduation.
Although clich?(c)d and predictable, writers Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa effectively connect with their target audience in the uplifting film's opening scene. Thirteen-year-old Jenna Rink (played by Christa B. Allen) sits in front of the artificial "cloudy sky" background for her junior high school pictures, appearing to feel insecure and awkward.
As the teenage Jenna dances in front of her mirror with a stuffed bra and her mother's lipstick before her birthday party, the gangly adolescent becomes mesmerized by the beauties on the covers of fashion magazines.
Because she offers to do the popular kids' homework, they tell her they will go to her party. When they show up at her house it isn't to celebrate, it is to snatch the finished assignment.
After tricking her into waiting in the closet while they sneak out of her house, Jenna is found blind-folded by her true friend and future love, Matt (Mark Ruffalo) only to realize that her so-called friends were playing a cruel joke on her.
While crying and hurt, the 13-year-old is sprinkled with a magic dust as she wishes to be "30, flirty and thriving."
Not to the audiences' surprise, an adult Jenna (Jennifer Garner from the television program "Alias") awakes to find not only a new bed and a lot of money, but a woman's breasts and a man in her shower.
Frantically trying to figure out why she is no longer a teenager with braces and a flat chest, Garner's acting is a bit hokey.
Upon running away from her apartment, Jenna conveniently makes her way to her job where she is an editor for the women's magazine "Poise." Acting like she has a severe hangover, the office does not suspect that yesterday she was a 13-year-old girl.
For the remaining duration of the unrealistic and impractical film, Jenna ignores the norms placed on adults in the screenplay writers' interpretation of today's society.
Becoming a heroine by reinventing the magazine she almost destroyed, she finds the part of herself she lost in the many years that she could not recall. Connecting with her past, family and Matt, her long lost friend, she becomes a humble and sincere person like she was as a child.
Relating to people of all ages, the film demonstrates that neglecting all that is important in life will earn you nothing but misery.
