Review

Review Date: 26-September-04
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Garden State (2004)

I avoided "Garden State" when it came out a few weeks ago because the trailer made it look so juvenile and arty, the kind of film a college sophomore would choose for a date if she or he thought appearing deep would translate into getting laid. Having been driven to it by a dearth of anything more appetizing, I discovered that the trailer did a good job representing the film as a whole. (Too bad I don't have any college sophomores in my sights.) But, juvenile and arty, I liked parts of "Garden State" just the same.

The movie details four days in the life of a young actor named Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff), who leaves LA and flies back to New Jersey to attend his mother's funeral. As with all modern dramas that (a) harbor any pretensions of depth and (b) deal with someone going home, this opens the door to a slew of painful, unresolved incidents having to do with his family and his past. In Andrew's case, these involve a medicine chest full of prescription drugs, an estranged psychiatrist father (Ian Holm), and a paraplegic mother whose death smacks of suicide.

Due to personality or long-standing habit (the difference between the two being key), Andrew approaches his difficult visit with the stoic air of the twentysomething who has seen it all. (Thankfully, because I like histrionic healers even less than jaded hipsters.) Thus, he puts off the big confrontation with his father and opts instead to party and hang out with an old high school friend (Peter Sarsgaard), whose pot-fueled, grave-digging, petty-thief existence enhances the image of the life Andrew left behind. Of course, he also happens to meet a woman who has both a beautiful exterior and a beautiful soul (Natalie Portman, developing into an actress after all), and her lessons mingle with his unusual homecoming to change the course of his future.

In addition to imbuing Andrew with a low-key nobility, Braff wrote and directed "Garden State," and his work behind the camera shows promise. There is a graceful quality to his direction that occasionally seems pretentious but just as often seems lovely, when expressed in a row of hair-trigger faucets, for example, or a pool at night, or Sarsgaard's beautiful face. And while Braff's writing falls prey to platitudes and an obvious desire to emphasize the quirkiness of life (in New Jersey --- how ironic!), he also displays a knack for a subtler form of whimsy that keeps the serious and disturbing parts of Andrew's history from claiming a higher (and probably more accurate) degree of prominence. Overall, "Garden State" is a simplistic tale presented with a self-conscious pop culture veneer, but it suggests the work of someone who has something meaningful to say and wants to find a distinctive way of saying it.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.