Originally published August 12, 2004
Garden State
Director: Zach Braff
Writer: Zach Braff
Producers: Pamela Abdy, Gary Gilbert, Dan Halsted, Richard Klubeck
Stars: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm
I’d offer that I consider Zach Braff – the writer/director/star of Garden State and a familiar face from his work as the amiable star of NBC’s Scrubs – to be a stronger director at this point than he is a writer. Working with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, he conjures up beautiful images out of the stuff of everyday New Jersey – a roaring oversized fireplace, a line of children holding hands as they cross the street. But for one piece of cheaply half-baked CGI, the movie’s look is unified, rich, and compelling.
Not as much the story it has to tell. Every generation has a right to navel gaze, and wile away nights thinking about life and fumbling their way to a philosophy about love, adventure and their place in the universe. I’ve had many of these nights, and treasure them. But such philosophies are lived unspoken by those who are older, and the fatal flaw of the young is to assume that their parents never could have had nights like it. And that has something to do with the flaws in this charming but ultimately less-substantial-than-it-seems filmmaking debut.
It’s only on reflection that one sees past the winning eccentricities in the world Braff creates, and the few beautiful dialogues built around the vaguely-baffled, disengaged deadpan he carries around on screen to ward off those eccentricities. It’s then that you realize this was, trappings stripped away, another story about the cloistered guy who meets the amazing and unpredictable girl who has it all figured out and convinces him to break out of his shell. And that not much of what happened was that profound. And, come to think of it, some of the details along the way seem downright clunky.
Braff plays Andrew Largeman, aka Large, working as an actor in Los Angeles and heavily, heavily medicated. “With the amount of Lithium you’ve been on I’m amazed you can even hear me”, his doctor offers, and we do agree that he seems…disconnected with life. How he could get jobs as an actor in that state, or even consider it as a career, is sidestepped.
It’s his father (Ian Holm) who has put him in this condition. He blames Andrew for the accident that crippled the mother of the family, and has numbed him with drugs ever since, confusing his own guilt for that which he presumes his son should carry. But now the mother is dead, and after years away from New Jersey, Large comes home to figure himself out. He leaves the pills behind.
Here he re-connects with Mark (Peter Saarsgard), who digs graves and supplants his income by hocking the dearly-departed’s jewelry. For him, life is still parties, beer, Ecstasy, and girls who may or may not be 18, but are already definitely drunk. For Large, it’s just leaving one world he didn’t belong in and coming into another.
But then he meets Sam (Natalie Portman), who was training to be an ice skater, gave up because of her epilepsy, and keeps enough pets around to need a small graveyard for them. She’s kooky, and loves obscure bands (the soundtrack is lively, and even acknowledges the movie’s parentage by using a song from The Graduate’s own Simon & Garfunkel), and flirts with Large with cheery relentlessness.
It’s as if she were sprung fully-formed into being with one purpose – to unlock the more self-actualized, non-pill-popping Large. It’s only because Natalie Portman graces the character with such vivacity, such total lack of self-consciousness, that we are charmed enough not to notice, for a long time, just how unformed her character is without Large to work her magic on. Every throwaway gesture, every moment of potentially-embarrassing spontaneity, reminds us just how deeply Portman’s talents run, and how wasted she is in the cardboard Star Wars prequels.
Over the course of a long weekend Large and Sam drift from one adventure to another – to a hotel where a hidden hallway offers paying voyeurs a chance to spy into “active” rooms, to a hilltop mansion where Large’s childhood friend has retired off of a rich patent for “silent Velcro”, and is now a lot more bored than he was when he was poor. Crazy, uncontrollable life is beating at Large from all sides, and we know that the only reason we’re watching is that he’s going to have to finally let it in.
Ian Holm makes the most of his brief screen time – he has a gift for injecting energy into any scene he occupies – but the big moment, the confrontation we’re all waiting for where Father and Son say what’s always gone unsaid, ends up a cheat. It’s where we realize that Braff the writer has punted on really challenging his heroes.
He stays in those wiling nights, thinking that’s where all meaning is to be found, in the speculations you make while sharing drinks with a friend. Lots of people write scripts about this, few of them get made, and that Braff found the clout to do so is no strike against him. It’s a pleasure that he has the filmmaker’s eye and the talented co-stars to make his writing into something greater than it was on the page. And it’s equally a pleasure that a movie this quirky, even imperfect as it is, found its way into theatres. That every generation goes through this sort of thing doesn’t lessen our generation’s right to embrace it anew.