Garden State: A Review of the Indy/Cult Favorite

Zach Braff's Garden State uses quirkiness as a way to disguise shallowness. The film is SO quirky and strives so hard to be quirky that it almost succeeds in distracting you from how dry and shallow it really is. What Braff does in the film is essentially take a very boring, apathetic and (allegedly) self-based protagonist and tries to make him interesting by surrounding him with a series of bizarre characters.

There was no overcoming the apathy in the film and the story unfolds like they took a trip through the screenwriting cliche factory and grabbed everything off the bestseller section. It's a Fish-Out-of-Water movie, meets a Coming-of-Age movie, meets a Quirky-Small-town movie, meets a Meet-Cute, meets a Troubled-Youth-Coming-To-Terms-With-His-Parents movie.

The plot of Garden State involves a recently successful actor (Braff himself)named Andrew returning to the hometown that he hasn't been to in x number of years for the funeral of his mother. We learn that Andrew has been on presription drugs his entire life, prescribed to him by his estranged psychologist father and that due to a big falling out he left his New Jersey hometown to pursue school at a young age and ended up a succesful actor. Braff plays Andrew, well, exactly like somebody who has been on an inordinate amount of prescriptions his entire life.

He deadpans the entire movie. He speaks in a low key, passive, monotone voice. He keeps the same facial expression through almost the entire film. He is deliberately and passionately apathetic. Braff shoots the film with Andrew being the focal point of everything. He's in the foreground a lot, he's the center of attention, he's in almost every frame and he's the focal point of each scene.

There is one scene in particular early on in the film at a party in which Andrew takes ecstasy and the world starts zooming by around him. Everything else in the frame moves in blurry, ultra-fast speed while Braff remains static in the middle of the screen sitting on a couch while people drink, dance, have sex and cause trouble all around him. Is the scene trying to emphasize how oblivious drugs make you to the world?

Is it REALLY hammering home that this is indeed your protagonist and the focal point of the film? Or does it accidentally emphasize how completely incapable this character is of having a good time while emphasizing his self indulgence? I'm afraid the answer is all three. Regardless, I never bought for a second that somebody this passive has turned into a successful movie star.

The New Jersey town that Andrew returns to is compromised of nothing but quirky, funny, weird characters. Pretty much everybody in the entire town is quirky. Frankly, if there's a small town that's even moderately as interesting as this in America I'd like to visit because the place seems almost vacant of any kind of boredom. We meet Andrew's best friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) who is a stoner that lives with his mom (just as big of a stoner) who dates a guy that works for medieval times and wanders around the house in a full coat of armor.

There's also another friend, a rich kid who made his fortune off of an invention and spends most of his days doing drugs and causing trouble. These characters just kind of vaguely drift in and out of scenes. They're there, and in many cases more interesting than Andrew himself but they are always in the background. Their unique character qualities bounce of Andrew like rubber balls against the wall. He won't get quirky with them, he doesn't fit in and doesn't look like he cares. We never learn much about these other characters other than their very basic qualities and frankly we'd like to know more.

The one character that does get quite a bit of attention is Sam (Natalie Portman). They meet in one of the most unrelentingly cute Meet Cutes In recent memory (For those who are unfamiliar, the "Meet Cute" is a term that applies to characters in a movie meeting one another in very cute, unpredictable fashion with obvious romantic implications). They meet in a doctor's office when she sees another woman's dog humping his leg for about five minutes straight (Yes I'm serious, and no it isn't funny).

They immediately break into conversation although the conversation generally involves her doing most of the talking. Portman's performance in this film consists of her endlessly reciting over-rehearsed dialogue as rapidly as she possibly can. She talks a lot in the film to be sure, and it's almost enough to distract us from the fact that she doesn't actually have much to say.

If you've read what I've described about the plot so far you can pretty much guess how the movie unfolds. Does the hero come to turns with the damage his father has done to him? Can he decide between the girl and his life outside of this town or can he have both? Does he gain a new found appreciation for his childhood? Does he finally learn how to emit emotion for the first time in his life? Does the sun come up in the morning? Braff is not an untalented filmmaker. He has a good sense of how to use a camera, knows character blocking, knows how to transition between scenes and knows a few cute little moviemaking tricks.

If he could use his creativity into a more focused, less pretentious way he might make a good film but Garden State is self-indulgent, boring and sophomoric. I've been told that this is the film that best speaks for and represents twenty-somethings in modern times. I am a twenty-something and am friends with a great deal of twenty-somethings and I can safely say that neither myself or any of my friends are adequately represented by this film in anyway. Garden State thinks it's an original, independent, non-Hollywood film but if you look just underneath the quirkiness you see Hollywood lingering everywhere.