Braff’s ‘Garden’ is a mixed bunch

ALLEN MacDONALD

The story for writer/director Zach Braff’s feature debut isn’t

complicated: a young man, Andrew Largeman (Braff), returns home after

a nine-year absence to attend the funeral of his estranged mother.

While there, he reconnects with friends (Peter Sarsgaard), attempts

to reconcile with his equally estranged father Gideon (Ian Holm) and

falls in love with a tender hearted waif (Natalie Portman), who is as

full of life as Andrew is lacking. That’s about it.

With a premise like this, the quality of the film is totally

dependent on the execution. “Garden State” succeeds, though without

consistency, and with a lot of help from a talented cast. The best

compliment I can give it, though slightly backhanded, is that it is a

brilliantly executed student film.

I saw the trailer for “Garden State” online a few months ago at

the request of a friend. I watched it and found it quite moving. It

was a series of images that were, at once, touching and funny. It

captured that right balance of life’s up and downs -- the unintended

comedy that often results from tragedy and it just felt ... sweet.

The images were united by a Frou Frou song called “Let Go,” which,

in hindsight, I feel may have invested them with more depth than they

actually had when pulled back apart and dropped into the movie they

were advertising. When watching the film, I felt the soundtrack was

well chosen, but acted more as a band-aid to a limping narrative that

couldn’t quite hold itself together alone.

That’s not to say “Garden State” doesn’t have some genuine emotion

behind it. It does. There’s a beautiful notion at its core: it’s

about returning to the house you grew up in and realizing it is no

longer home, and that the only home you’ll have in the future is the

one you make for yourself.

Braff has bravely thrown some nakedly emotional moments onto the

screen and for that, I applaud him. It’s too easy these days to be

the cynic, making apathetic criticisms and judgments of those around

him from a place of emotionally disconnected superiority.

Unfortunately, Braff never earns his emotional payoffs and as a

result, the material never transcends its pretentious core.

And “Garden State” is at times pretentious. It’s cinematography

and production design is over-stylized. When we first meet Andrew,

he’s in a room that’s painted all white, with a bed that has white

sheets, a white end table and a white alarm clock. This, I imagine,

is the use of symbolism to drive home the point that Andrew’s life

has reached a surreal numbness where there is no pleasure or pain,

only consciousness. I get that.

When Andrew closes the mirrored doors of his medicine cabinet, and

the line separating the doors slices down the middle of his face, I

get that too -- he’s feeling conflicted. In scenes like these, I feel

Braff is wielding the visual equivalent of a sledgehammer.

The main problem is that the emotions aren’t earned; they’re just

displayed randomly. Andrew starts the film in an

antidepressant-fueled state of numbness and, as he abandons his

medication, is supposed to start opening up to the world. Instead, we

get a series of scenes where he’s the straight man as his wacky

friends do crazy stuff around him, most notably at an after hours

party. He’s an inactive protagonist, and that’s a hard kind to pull

off.

Andrew doesn’t slowly come out of his shell so much as he makes a

sudden leap, telling off his friends and declaring his feelings. A

character has to change in incremental steps that make the

transformation believable. The viewer needs to see outside forces

compel Andrew into action; to witness him going through a progression

of emotions that build up to a realization about himself that allows

him to whip his life into shape.

What “Garden State” does well is use humor to endear you to its

characters. Braff displays an oddball sense of humor, more grin

inspiring than hysterical. But he knows the funniest jokes are the

ones that are rooted in pain.

That can also describe the characters: Andrew’s best friend from

high school, Mark (Sarsgaard), buries people in a Jewish cemetery for

a living. He supplements that meager income by opening the casket and

stealing valuables off the body. Mark’s mother (Jean Smart) is a

dysfunctional mess, kind-hearted, tough and sleeping with a guy he

graduated high school with who now works at Medieval Times as a

jousting knight.

Andrew’s love interest, Sam (Natalie Portman), is epileptic and

manic, given the spurts of joy and sorrow with equal aplomb. Sam

likes to feel life, absorbing as much of the spectrum of human

emotions as she can muster, because it makes her feel alive.

She’s also a pathological liar and her character can be a bit too

precious at times. She’s the kind of idiosyncratic, eccentric girl

who you fall in love with on the screen, but would be ready to give

the heave ho in real life after 48 hours because, let’s face it,

she’d drive you insane.

But Portman is a natural, engaging actress that excels in the role

despite its limitations. And, it should be noted, I don’t care what

movie she’s in -- it causes me physical pain to watch Natalie Portman

cry. As soon as the first tear stains her cheek, I’m emotionally

invested.

Braff has a real talent for delving into the lives of some unique

people, but his dialogue needs more subtlety. It’s on the nose,

didactic. When Andrew finally has a long simmering confrontation with

his father, it fails to unearth the raw pain that can occur when

parents and children who know each others’ buttons start pushing. It

plays more like a teenage fantasy argument, where the son tells the

dad how he’s been totally wrong for 20 years, and dad remains silent

because he knows his son is right.

That’s the distinction that prevents “Garden State” from breaking

past its film school mold.

* ALLEN MacDONALD, 30, recently earned a master’s in screenwriting

from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.