Scrubs’ Zach Braff’s feature film directorial debut was Garden State. He plays a numb, possibly one hit wonder actor, who returns home for his mother’s funeral and rediscovers feeling emotions when he reconnects with high school friends and meets a woman who is interested in him, whom Natalie Portman plays. If you saw “Closer” (2004), it is the same idea as the opening scene except Portman is dressed like a preteen, there is less profanity and it is set in New Jersey, not London. While the film starts strong, it loses steam rapidly because Braff has surrounded himself with more interesting characters, a cast of better actors and his protagonist and acting abilities are comparatively dull. Braff needs Ben Affleck to mentor him.
Garden State has a run time of one hour forty-two minutes. Braff certainly has an eye for visual arresting moments, and his strongest sequence is the opening, establishing shots to set the stage for his character’s sleepwalking through life. He wordlessly communicates that his character is institutionalized without the institution with a stark white room. Braff has a theme of bathrooms as imbued with deeper significance for each character, and his medicine cabinet is all the backstory that we need. This institutionalized aesthetic carries over to his car as he enters LA traffic just as characteristically as he lives his life.
The second part of Garden State is devoted to his return home and reunion with family and friends. One character in a Kubrickian meta shout out suggests that Braff’s character could make a movie about him. Ta da! Braff has done it. The specific oddness of each character suggests that the film is autobiographical, which is a little disturbing considering later revelations. Peter Sarsgaard as his unambitious, illegally self-medicated, closest friend at home, threatens to steal the entire show. Sarsgaard usually plays villains and seems to be the unofficial heir to John Malkovich, but in this film, he strikes the right tone of self-sufficient pride and satisfaction with his life even if he seems like a loser and member of the low key criminal underworld. There is one scene with two fluffy cats, Jean Smart and Jim Parsons that made me want to ditch Braff’s character and make the movie about them. It is the best part of the movie.
The third part of Garden State is full of epiphanies about the protagonist’s emotional state and when he meets the girl that he decides is the one although at a party the prior night, he had a similar moment, but I guess for it to stick, the key is not leaving his side and having nothing else to do. Portman’s character allegedly has a full-time job at a law firm, but she is with him for three days. Was it a long weekend? Was she on vacation? I just need one line to explain why she is spending every minute with this guy. I understand that to everyone else, he is a famous actor so that veneer of success may make him more riveting than he actually is, but she needs the job. I am not ditching my job for anyone other than Keanu Reeves, who is taken and congratulations to them.
It was probably intentional, but I thought the relationship dynamic had seeds of doom early. The protagonist sees her as easier going, jovial and innocent than she is. She never hesitates to set boundaries, and he respects them, but I suspected that the woman that he saw, and the woman whom she is are very different people. She is not hiding it, but he is not seeing it. He literally sees her and everyone else as supporting characters in his movie, and when they recognize it, they fight against it, but he never succeeds in recalibrating his view other than superficially. I was alarmed that she could make fun of him, but he could not mirror that behavior. While it seems fair because of the power disparity, it also seems as if taking herself seriously and being unable to joke about herself will be a problem with someone like the protagonist. She is not going to consent to being his emotional stereo once she figures out that he mentally cast her in that role.
Garden State loses steam in the last half hour when Braff realizes that he has to tie everything together and come up with some sort of catharsis for his character in the denouement, but fails. He brings his past together with his present by introducing Portman’s character to his high school friends. There is a nice Citizen Kane reprise moment in the middle of a mansion in front of a big fireplace. The partying eventually gives way to a scavenger hunt to meet a series of other quirky characters, and a hilarious visual metaphor for being a third wheel. Instead of being the star in his movie, Braff’s character feels more like a Dickensian main character where everyone else is more captivating than the protagonist. Action unfolds around him, but the star is comparatively passive.
Garden State’s original sin is abandoning the original story of how to resolve the numbness of the beginning with tropes like stop taking your prescription medicine, socialize and live. Braff treats the central concept, why the protagonist is so numb, like an afterthought that he barely devotes ten minutes to, and when the origin is revealed, it is way more serious than Braff is willing to tackle by focusing on the father and son dynamic in more than a pat way. Braff did not have to use such a grave reason, but he did then brushes it off. There are allusions to psychological abuse, violence and trauma. Ian Holm plays his father, and he simultaneously plays his character with a mixture of terror, disappointment and concern. When the father and son finally hash everything out, it is anti-climactic. Braff rushes as quickly as he can to his romantic storyline completing omitting the fact that his character was abused for decades, and/or he is a sociopath who does not take things seriously. Just because abuse is not intentional does not mean that it did not happen.
Garden State generally does not age well. It repeatedly uses certain words that are now considered slurs to describe people with developmental disorders. With the headphones, the way that she sat in chairs and spoke, I initially thought that Portman’s character was autistic. The punchline of a lot of jokes was animal cruelty. No, thank you. Garden State shows that Braff is a better director than writer or actor in that order, but I hope that he got therapy because if his work reflects his psychological state, the issues that he thinks that he must work on are not the issues that he must work on. He makes Lars von Trier seem like an ocean of self-awareness on a journey of self-healing although Braff’s damage is far less severe. His excellent cast and quirky characters make the movie more enjoyable than it should be, but ultimately left me cringing with his unintentional revelations.
