Garden State
"A Nice Try"
That's what the guy at my local video store said when I returned Garden State the other day, and I think it just about sums it up perfectly. "Great," you say, "with such a perfect summing up, there'll be no need for the usual geek ramblings from this try-hard wannabe reviewer." Well, you rude fuck, I still think the film needs to be summed up in my usual 'imperfect' way, and don't call me a try-hard or I'll get my Dad onto you, okay?
Zach Braff's debut film as writer/director/star, about an actor coming home from L.A. to the ‘burbs of New Jersey after his mother passes away, is obviously semi-autobiographical and is thus rendered in loving strokes. The splashes of humour are dry and welcome, but sparse. I think much of the film is supposed to make you smile, and nothing more. The situations the characters find themselves in are mostly of the whacky – not of the funny. To paraphrase a friend of mine (not the guy at the local video store), describing his own style of stand-up: “it's light comedy - not cack-yourself comedy”.
This film ambles nicely along, but it is rather a forced, labored ambling. Writer/Director Zach Braff has created a film so intent on being a nice ambling arthouse picture that it cannot hide its pretentiousness. No real discernable plot, whimsical indie rock music and quirky characters - a “slice of life” type deal like you have (and obviously Braff has) seen many times before in indie flicks.
The performances, especially Braff, are purposely understated which makes me hesitate to either applaud or criticize them. I like Zach Braff. I'm getting heavily into Scrubs since its release on DVD and think he's something of a genuine talent, with great comic timing. Here he is turns himself down from the neurotic 11 he is in Scrubs , to more of a 2 or a 3. Still good, but good enough to carry a film on his own? I'll just leave that question hanging there, and you can decide if it was rhetorical or not.
Natalie Portman is certainly cute as ‘The Becky character', and it's great to see her trying to act again, as opposed to just standing around reciting lines like she did in the Star Wars prequels. What's that? What's this Becky character? Perhaps I should explain.
Ever since What's Eating Gilbert Grape , where Juliette Lewis played an off-beat life-loving spark of a girl that wakens Johnny Depp's Gilbert from his slumber through life, I have noticed that same certain character types pop-up occasionally in films such as this. The all-knowing “you've got to take risks in life” girl, who despite her own problems, helps the main character learn to love the craziness of life.
Same deal here.
In fact that's not the only similarity between the films. Gilbert Grape sleepwalks through life while Garden State 's heavily medicated Andrew Largeman is cocooned off from it. The film is also peppered with jokes about Largeman's biggest film role as a retarded high-school football player. “You're not actually retarded?”, Sam (Portman) asks him – which would have been the same question anyone who watched What's Eating Gilbert Grape would have asked Leonardo DiCaprio had they met him before he sank with that big boat in that little film, whatever it was called.
There are little moments in this film that are not only highlighted – but also underlined and italicized - as moments that are supposed to be deeply imbued with meaning - the main culprit being the cathartic-scream scene where Braff's character Andrew Largeman snaps out of his medicated coma-like life. Likewise I'm sure there was meant to be some kind of symbolic relevance of the ark that is nestled above a bottomless pit, but fuck me if I know what that is meant to be.
You only have to do a brief scan of the net to see that its fans revere the film, often citing it as something of a ‘life-changer' or as a film that “really spoke to me”. I can only hazard a guess that either a great deal of people connect with the feelings of, well, unconnected-ness and detachedness which Largeman has to break through (with help from his ‘Becky'), or, most likely, they were seduced by the whimsical music and cuteness of the characters and actors and just developed s crush on the film. Then there are those who flat out hate the film and think it's a total wank. I, forever the exception to the rule (it's what my Mum says makes me “special”), fall somewhere in between.
I get what Braff was trying to do, and even admire him for wanting to do something a bit different, but it is such a mainstream sanitized attempt to be blatantly arthouse that I cannot fully applaud it. Still, as a first effort it certainly is admirably on many fronts.
A nice try indeed.
I think I'll close this review with some more wisdom from my local video store clerk:
"If you're just hiring this to see her titties you'll be disappointed, mate."
And he was right once again.