Review
GARDEN STATE
Starring Zach Braff, Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard
Written and Directed by Zach Braff
Opens Friday August 20
Check listings
Garden State, Zach Braff’s debut as writer-director-actor, is inexplicably being touted as a romantic comedy, albeit a dark and independent one. But about the only thing it has in common with romantic comedies is that the main character, Alex Largeman (Braff), gets the girl.
The standard elements of romantic comedy – vapid characters, hollow emotion, clichéd conflict, a love that’s nearly impossible – are all missing. Braff’s got other things in mind with Garden State. He’s actually got a vision and, much like the early films of Woody Allen, he makes romance serve that vision rather than letting it get in the way of the bigger issues.
And there are two very big issues at stake in Garden State: our contemporary dependence on psychotropic medication and our society’s obsession with avoiding the pain of life.
Largeman, a pseudo-successful L.A. television actor who portrays a mentally retarded quarterback, gets a phone call from his controlling, psychiatrist father (Ian Holm). His paraplegic mother has drowned in her bathtub and his father – the man who has doomed Largeman to the heavily-medicated lethargy that scored him his dubious television role – wants him home for the funeral.
Largeman receives the news with a stoicism that can only be achieved through chemical health. His face is a placid mask of stunned detachment, but somewhere in his emotional fog he makes the decision that will define the rest of his life. He opens the medicine cabinet, a literal pharmacy of drugs, and closes it without taking any. He closes the door on his meds and welcomes pain for the first time since his childhood.
And there’s a whole lot of pain, but nothing terribly extraordinary. Once he’s back home, re-connecting with the past and engaging with his future, we discover the secret of his mother’s paralysis, the reasons behind his father’s benevolent/malevolent prescriptions, why he spent his high school years in boarding school and why he’s finally letting his pain in. All of it hurts, but it’s all life, and Largeman finally starts to live it.
When he does start living it, Largeman discovers something else that comes along with the pain he’s spent his life avoiding – pleasure. He finds pleasure in Sam (Natalie Portman), the girl who makes him fall in love. He finds pleasure in his gravedigger friend, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), the only member of his old life who genuinely cares about him. He finds pleasure in rainfalls and abysses and epilepsy helmets and hamster funerals and girls on figure skates. But he mostly finds pleasure in pain. It’s a revelation for Largeman, and it’s meant to be a revelation for us.
The triumph of Braff’s Garden State is that the revelation really does reach us – and not with a sledgehammer to the head. Braff’s screenplay and direction are subtle enough to let us figure out what’s going on, without his concerns being so hidden as to be unreachable. His characters talk about life while they’re living it, figuring things out for themselves, and no one ever preaches Braff’s message. It’s simply there onscreen for all to see. And it’s left up to us to take or leave as we will.
It’s not too much to say that in Zach Braff we may have found the next Woody Allen, but it’s better and more accurate to say that we’ve finally found our Zach Braff. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.