When I first saw the ads for “13 Going on 30,” I thought, “Oh, it’s just a girl version of ‘Big.’” You can read my concerns about “Big” here, but to summarize, I felt that the boy had been put into situations he couldn’t possibly have handled well and come out unscathed, including a sexual relationship. How do you go back to being a child after having experienced adult physical relationships? So as I sat down to watch “13 Going on 30,” I was understandably concerned. I’m so delighted to say, though, that I was unnecessarily worried.
Jenna Rink is turning thirteen, and she wants it to be the start of a whole new life. She’s a little bit of a nerd, the smart one, and she’d much rather be one of the popular girls. She does homework for the cool crowd, hoping that they’ll accept her as one of their own, but instead they dump on her and make her already-low self-esteem even lower. Her one good friend is Matt, the boy who lives next door, who’s also had a crush on her forever.
The night of her birthday party, she invites the cool girls to come over, but they only come to pick up a report she wrote for them. They leave her humiliated, and she then takes out her frustration on Matt. She passionately wishes she could be thirty – that’s when you’re supposed to have it all together, right? As her birthday wish, she is suddenly moved forward in time and becomes thirty years old (played by Jennifer Garner). And she can’t remember anything that happened in the years between, because essentially, she wasn’t there.
Now she works as an editor at a magazine, has an awesome apartment, a boyfriend who stays over, and apparently has been a real shrew her whole life. She discovers that very few people like her, and when she hunts down Matt (now played by Mark Ruffalo) he tells her that she basically turned super-snotty after that party and he hasn’t really talked to her since. She’s dismayed to realize what a mess she’s made of her life, and is determined to do it better.
At the end of the film, she goes back to being a thirteen-year-old, but now she has the chance to change her future. Everything turns out the way she wants because she’s seen how her future could be otherwise, and she takes the precautions necessary.
I really was relieved that she never entered a sexual relationship and that she was able to keep her basic naivety. She learned a lot, but wasn’t rushed into anything that she should have learned as a natural progression. I enjoyed the overall message – that we can control our destinies by making wise choices now.
There was a little language, but I was never offended at any point during this PG-13 rated film. In fact, the scene we do see where her boyfriend is trying to seduce her made me laugh out loud, it was so funny.
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