Wednesday Movie - Garden State

Garden State is a very good movie. Just wanted to get that out there right at the start, because a little farther along I’m going to start sharing my issues with this movie, particularly the last fifteen minutes of it. So up front and right away—I really enjoyed it. If you haven’t seen it, pick it up. If you have, go tell Zach Braff that you liked it.

It’s the story of Andrew Largeman, a mostly out of work actor who has been tranquilized with anti-depressants since the age of ten. After getting the call that his mother has died, he returns home to New Jersey for the first time in nine years, and he makes the decision to do so with a clear head, leaving LA without his requisite arsenal of medication. He has an awkward visit with his father (who is also his psychiatrist), and remains numb throughout his mother’s service, but after the funeral an odyssey begins. He connects with an old friend from school and a free-spirited, oddly compelling girl, and finds himself traveling through one bizarre situation to the next: eating sugared cereal with a Medieval Times knight, entered a hotel backroom where the staff members spy on tenants having sex, visiting a couple who live in a dry-docked boat next to a seemingly bottomless gorge. At first, Largeman finds himself overwhelmed and even afraid, but as the lithium seeps out of him, his hometown becomes a source of strange beauty. He revels in the exploration of the home he left, and the self he’d spent half a lifetime drugging into a stupor.

This is a damn good looking movie. You expect actors turned writer/directors to have an ear for dialogue (well you hope, anyway) but nice visuals aren’t necessarily a given. Braff has a great eye for detail. In some cases, it’s a simple element—like a line of hand-holding children crossing the street—but often it’s more complex—the camera closing in on a unblinking, immobile Largeman as a drug drenched party rages around him in double time.

The three leads are also perfect. Braff, of course, acting as if the role was written for him (har har); Peter Sarsgaard, subtle but brilliant as the burn-out friend; and Natalie Portman, pulling off the free-spirit role in a way Drew Barrymore could only dream. Restoring my faith in Natalie Portman after the “hold me like you did by the lake in Naboo” debacle—for that alone the movie earns my strong recommendation.


Now, the ending. (This gets a little spoilericious, so feel free to stop here. Remember thought that we’re not talking about an M. Night Shyamalan movie, so I’m probably not going to ruin the whole thing for you.)

It has road movie elements, even though it’s not about travel. It goes from situation to situation, and each location has new and distinct characters that only last for a few short scenes. It’s episodic, and I bought all the episodes—except two. First, the abyss scene. Largeman and his friends meet a couple who live in a houseboat, and whose job it is to watch over a chasm that has opened up in the earth, so that no one wanders in and gets hurt. The husband, Albert, reveals that he explores the depths of this chasm secretly at night. It’s yet another random encounter in the series of random, but this is the first time one it seems contrived. They walk in, Albert says let me tell you about my chasm, and then they walk out. And then we get this exchange on the doorstep:
Largeman: Hey, Albert—good luck exploring the infinite abyss.
Albert: Thanks. Hey, you too.
I hated this moment. It yanked me right out of the film. It barely made sense within the context of the scene, and it screamed out THEME. Yes, Largeman has begun a journey of both outward and inward exploration. I got that on my own, thanks so much. And if I hadn’t, I could still enjoy the movie without being told outright what the theme was.

The second episode that didn’t ring true to me was the showdown between Braff’s character and his father. Before he leaves for the airport, Largeman confronts his dad about the overmedication, and the guilt he’d been saddled with over his mother’s invalidism (the story of which is probably the movie’s biggest surprise so I won’t delve further). He summarizes all the things his father did wrong in bringing him up, and then forgives him. Nice moment, needed to happen, but it comes with almost no resistance from his father. Largeman goes on and on with barely an interruption, and as the man he’s ranting at is both his father and his psychiatrist, it doesn’t seem quite right.

I think the reason I’m so critical about this movie is that it’s something I could conceivably have written. That’s not ego talking. What I’m saying in a basic sense is that it uses common language and deals with subject matter that isn’t beyond my realm of comprehension. While I could never in my lifetime have written Das Boot, it’s conceivable that I could have written Garden State. Conceivable: Dungeons & Dragons; inconceivable: Schindler’s List. Lock me in a hotel room for two months with a laptop and a bathtub full of Paxil and I still probably wouldn’t churn out something nearly as good as the script for this movie, I’m just saying it’s possible.