File this one under nice, literate and honest. Not great, not a revelation. Zack Braff, more widely known as the star of NBC’s Scrubs sitcom, wrote and directed Garden State and got some festival awards and critical plaudits. To some degree this seems to have been a reaction to the idea of a network sitcom star writing and directing a low budget indie film since the movie is, like I said, nice but not great.
Braff plays Andrew Largeman, an actor successful enough to be semi-recognizable enough in his hometown but not to avoid waiting tables while between roles. His medicine cabinet is filled with vials of prescription pills and his bedroom is completely white, down to the pillowcases. At the open, Largeman gets a call, which he screens, that turns out to be his father (Ian Holm looking distinctly un-Bilboish) notifying him that his paraplegic mother drowned in the bathtub and died. He gets on a plane to New Jersey, giving us the title.
In the course of four days he meets up with high school pals and acquaintances–they’re all 26 years old now–who give him comps for how life is working out. A reasonably typical assortment and everyone calls him Large; from watching I didn’t realize this was his name, I figured since his character is Jewish it was something more like Larchman or Lachman. Large complains of odd headaches and so his father, also his psychiatrist and the prescriber of all those pills, sends him to a neurologist (Ron Rifkin) where he meets Natalie Portman. Portman is not coiffed with strange braid patterns.
The remainder/bulk of the film covers the next few days during which Large bonds with Portman, comes to terms with Holm and realizes, and this is why I made the comment about not being a great revelation, that life is to be lived. Not wasted on pot (his best friend from back in the day), pills (as his dad would have it) or fighting a constant battle to understand “Why?” (his mom). Interesting, decent acting from the key players, but all in all more of a promise of Braff’s potential.
Braff did a blog though after he finished all the post-premiere and DVD publicity chores he stopped posting; which is okay, the film’s essentially done and the blog is still out on the web for reading. The posts attracted fairly heavy quantity of comments, I must say.
recommended
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