I hate how many movies today are about the emptimess and plasticity of contemporary life. I hate that, in contemporary American indie cinema, 'quirky' has replaced intellligent and well made. I hate movies where, because the director can't illustrate a mood with dialogue, montage, or mise en scene, he does so by relying on a blaring soundtrack. I hate good actors who are wasted with bad scripts.And I hated Zach Braff's Garden State.
This was, in almost every possible way I can consider, just an awful, terrible movie. The sets were bad. The dialogue was terrible. The lighting and photography were sub par. Really, just about the only thing I enjoyed was the soundtrack, and I enjoyed that begrudgingly, because the (admittedly good) music was used so, so badly...
Andrew Largeman (writer/director/star Zach Braff) is an out of work TV actor waiting tables in a Vietnamese restaurant in LA. The single scene of the restaurant is our sole look at Southern California, from which we can assume that LA is populated primarily by Ketel One and Red Bull drinking assholes. Andrew gets a call from his father telling him his mother has died, and his presence at the funeral is requested. So, 'Large', as he's known by his friends back home, travels unwillingly back to New Jersey, where the rest of the movie takes place.
You could probably write the rest of the movie by yourself, and do at least as good a job as Braff. At the funeral we see how empty and fake his relatives lives are, and how disassociated Andrew is from his past. He runs into some friends, and goes to a party, where we learn much backstory. Then, of course, he meets a girl. Since this is a current American indie/romantic/comedy, the girl is cute, intelligent, yet somehow flawed. Played by Natalie Portman, Sam's flaw is nothing that actually gets in the way of the story, unlike Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Through Sam, Andrew learns some major life lessons, falls in love, and has his life changed forever.
There were a couple of nice moments in Garden State, but they were few and far between. One scene in an implausibly placed quarry was generally wonderful, and the scene wehere Andrew and Sam meet (at a barren and oddly decrepit Neurologist's office) was also fairly nice. That was pretty much it.
2/5
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