2004: Garden State

Garden State (Braff, 2004) 3/10

"I spent 26 years waiting for something else to start, so, no, I don't think it's too much to take on, because it's everything there is." (Andrew Largeman)

In the mid-Nineties, American independent cinema appeared to be on the rise. Actors such as Dustin Hoffman vowed never to appear in another mainstream project, while Miramax produced a slew of Academy Award nominated films such as The English Patient, Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love to critical and commercial acclaim. And then it happened. Rather, suddenly and abruptly, American independent cinema no longer evolved into a critical national art cinema, but instead sank into an atrophic environment of smugness and self-pity.

In this post-9/11 malaise, American cinema lost its vitality. The once fearful major studios such as Warner Brothers and Paramount set up independent branches releasing the type of fare audiences were supposed to expect from independents: self-important films dealing with domestic crises and self-loathing. In this malaise an array of blundering productions past quietly over the American cinematic landscape. Pictures like A Home At The End of The World, We Don't Live Anymore and Northfork filled in this void. The artsy inclinations these branches were supposed to attend to became transposed into outlets for quirky projects with mainstream aspirations such as Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine.

Garden State can be viewed as a synthesis of this concerning dilemma in American independent cinema: an ongoing battle between mainstream audiences and artistic intentions that supplies ideas of social abbhorance within an eccentric setting. Starring, written and directed by Scrubs star Zach Braff, Garden State is a typical generic entry in American independent cinema: operating within the formulaic visual and contextual codes the medium has consciously fostered and solidified over the past decade.

A failed actor, now working as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant, Andrew Largeman (Braff) decides to return home to New Jersey for the funeral of his paralysed mother. Bearing guilt over his mother's condition, the heavily medicated Largeman decides to jettison his daily routine of pills against the advice of his psychiatrist father Gideon (Ian Holm). Desperate to "feel" something, Andrew reconnects with his past including his former colleagues such as Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) and a new love interest in the form of Samantha (Nathalie Portman): an epileptic free-spirit and pathological liar.

Garden State captures a culture of twentysomethings unable or unwilling to take the next step into adulthood. Needing to take risks, Andrew learns in a period of four days in his home state of New Jersey, the necessity of finding purpose in his maudlin life. Through Samantha, he is able to break free from the expectations of his father and over a period of ninety-six hours come to realize the importance of creating a life distinguished from his past and his father's ambitions.

The film's three principal characters are each insulated from the outside world through recreational or prescription drugs. The theme of medication becomes particularly important for Braff's character, who through releasing himself from his prescribed narcotics can evidently absolve himself from his father's pathetic authoritarianism. For the film's New Jersey based characters, this neverending stream of parties, drugs and alcohol- a would-be relic from a high school era- typifies their inhibited goals and aims. Through drugs, they find salvation from the toil and burden of their days, yet in Braff's construction several of these characters seem happy to reside within these stilted ambitions and low life goals.

Filled with brittle characters and generational clichés, Garden State is a broken record stuck on the same worn out groove. Anointing himself as his generational spokesman, Braff concocts a film that liberally borrows and steals from about half dozen similarly themed films and re-packages it with visual quirks and a torpid acoustic soundtrack. Extracting visual ideas and generational sentiments from films like Mike Nichols' The Graduate, Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Kevin Smith's Clerks, Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, Richard Linklater's subUrbia, Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, Garden State attempts to distinguish itself from the latter films through an inherent self-righteous smugness.

The film aims to cater to a generation numbed by narcotics, materialism and lofty expectations. Yet, it never individuates the generation it aims to embolden from the alienated qualities suffered by Bud Cort's Harold or Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock three decades earlier. Instead Braff's film makes heroes out of dysfunctional also-rans: glorifying perennial shoplifters, junkies and dead-beats, while mocking the only character who has achieved any success in his life. The immaturity of youth is granted a reprieve in this East Coast suburbia. There members of "Gen-Med" are to be applauded for aiming low and failing to fulfill the promises of youth. But after viewing Garden State, one must wonder who really wants to be stuck in their hometown, collecting Desert Storm trading cards, digging (their own) graves and taking copious amount of illegal drugs?

Not I, but somehow Braff's film has become contextualized as a generational statement. Braff intended it this way when he claimed the film was "a big, life-affirming, state-of-the-union address for twentysomethings." Despite his grandiose intentions, Braff's film fails simply because it is like a State of the Union address: a collection of carefully selected words, disguising the hollow nature of the topical matter within. Garden State is all surface and no feeling.

The only substance here is found in the drugs the characters frequently engage in. Braff's film may be about wanting to "feel" something, but given the fact his characters simply care about suppressing their feelings through drugs, it begs the question what do they real want to feel? Braff's Andrew Largeman insists he wants to feel something, but does he really? In becoming an adult and growing up, Andrew must "feel" pain, disappointment, regret and so forth in order go achieve happiness and satisfaction. But like the film's other characters, he willingly holds back: preferring to remain in the safe world of childhood, rather than risk the disconcerting realities of life.

In Garden State Braff has generalized an entire generation of small-town suburban kids as being simply happy with mediocrity. Overtly symbolic characters speak in their inaccurate Generation Y tongue, walk home in Medieval Times suits of armour and collect tears in Dixie cups. Yet, through the film's messy pretentious linings, they, nor Braff make no purposeful or genuine statements about generational alienation. Instead, Braff treats his audience to an array of bizarre images that make no sense in the overall dynamic of the picture: substituting genuine emotional substance for bland sentimentality and absurd eccentricity soundtracked to an aura of anesthization mirrored in the comatose diegetic music.

Ridiculously lauded at the time of its release, Garden State will most likely wither away from our collective memories by the end of the next decade. This is due purely to the film's lack of original substance, as Braff unconsciously attempts to out-quirk his predecessors and rivals with his narcissistic self-congratulatory style. There is plenty of interesting imagery here, but it feels forced: masking the film's unsettling lack of purpose and Braff's disorganized script. Characters are introduced and jettisoned, whilst "realistic" settings bask in an inchoate surrealism. For a film so openly desiring to acheive a capsulized statement about alienation, discontent and misunderstanding, it is quite fitting that such an annoucement comes in the form of an incoherent moan.

* Garden State is available through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque