Where did I go wrong?

It seems to be a common question; once again I find myself faced with the sad situation that I am not terribly unique, that everybody else has the same problems, the same fears and the same dreams. 13 Going On 30 is an example of this.

It’s young Jenna Rink’s 13th birthday. Her best bud Matt “The Beaver” Flamhaff is going to take photos of it, and he also gives her a model “dream house” that he’s been working on for three weeks. But Jenna’s not all that interested in Matt; now that she’s a teener, she wants to be with the in-crowd, led by the haughty Tom-Tom, and have school heartthrob Chris Grandy get to second base with her. Who cares that Tom-Tom and Chris and their friends have no particular interest in Jenna, except as the butt of their jokes? And then, just as Jenna takes out her frustrations on an uncomprehending Matt, she gets a test of Matt’s other gift, a packet of “wishing dust” that seems to do what it’s advertised to do, and she suddenly finds herself waking up in a New York apartment (Jennifer Garner!), complete with resident semi-nude hunk, and she is 30 years old and an editor of Poise, a woman’s magazine a la Cosmopolitan, one that’s locked in a deadly competition with a similar (overly similar! who’s spilling the beans?) mag, Sparkle.

First thing she does, of course, is look up Matt (Mark Ruffalo). But Matt doesn’t know what’s going on; after that 13th birthday, he and Jenna grew apart, they haven’t seen each other since high school, and he’s engaged to be married to a lady TV forecaster from Chicago. Jenna’s main co-worker is Lucy (Judy Greer), who turns out to be Tom-Tom, grown up but not much changed, though this has apparently not bothered Jenna before her sudden metamorphosis back to that 13-year-old girl in a full-grown actress’s body, since — as we learn — Jenna has changed in ways that are not always admirable.

I’ve seen the movie compared with Tom Hanks’ Big (which is probably fair) and with the various incarnations of Freaky Friday (which probably isn’t). Basically, it’s a story telling about how Jenna’s youthful behavior changed her life in ways of which she is not proud — and how she gets a chance to unmake those changes.

I sort of liked Jenna’s editor-in-chief, Richard, a rather sympathetic character whom we last saw biting off Frodo Baggins’s finger last winter. He does not, however, attempt to cough out hairballs in this film (“Gollum! Gollum!”).

All in all, a rather pleasant film, and one with a happy ending, which always gets points from me.