by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I took a break from the news coverage
of the “Super Tuesday” elections by watching a used DVD I had just bought from
the Mission Valley Library when I went there (ironically enough) to cast our
ballots: Garden State, a 2004 film from
Fox Searchlight Pictures (20th Century-Fox’s specialty film
division, which not surprisingly was closed almost immediately once the Walt
Disney Company took over 20th Century-Fox) that was an auteur
de force for Zach Braff, who wrote and
directed as well as starring in it. Charles and I both remembered having heard
vaguely good things about it when it was released, though we hadn’t bothered to
go see it, and it turned out to be a modern-day version of a 1930’s rom-com.
Braff plays Andrew Largeman, who lives alone in Los Angeles in a stark white
apartment whose only unique feature is a medicine cabinet lined with little
bottles of pills, all lined up in neat and meticulously maintained rows. He’s
one of those wanna-be actors in Hollywood who’s working as a waiter at a fancy
Viet Namese restaurant for a living — and the proprietor (played in a cameo by
well-regarded stage director George C. Wolfe) is not only ready to fire but has
his replacement already lined up (and has a head shot of him, indicating that he
too is an aspiring actor). What makes Andrew different from most such
characters is he’s got at least a toehold in the business filming TV
commercials, of which the best-known and the one he sometimes gets recognized
for is one in which he plays a mentally retarded football quarterback. (We’re
never told what product this oddball commercial advertised.) The plot kicks off
into high gear when Andrew gets a call from his father in New Jersey that his
mother has just died — and Braff, who unlike a lot of other modern-day
directors does not believe in
long transitions, cuts directly to her funeral and we see a photo of her in a
wheelchair. We also hear Andrew’s aunt (Jackie Hoffman) at the funeral,
accompanied by a man playing a portable electronic keyboard instrument, doing a
hilariously terrible version of Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” as
Andrew’s mom’s send-off song.
Andrew hasn’t been back to his home town in nine
years — we’re not sure where in
New Jersey it is, though it’s mentioned as being close to Newark — and it turns
out his dad is also his therapist and has kept him on psychotropic drugs,
including lithium, ever since Andrew accidentally caused his mother’s
disability by pushing her into an open dishwasher door when he was 9. Andrew
falls in with friends he knew in high school, including Mark (Peter Sarsgaard,
who frankly did more for me in the looks department than Braff did, at least
partly because he was often shown topless and had some nice chest hair while
Braff’s chest was hairless), a scapegrace druggie who throws (or crashes)
parties with lots of drink, drugs and sex; and Kenny (Michael Weston), who made
a bundle inventing a noiseless version of Velcro and bought a large house where
Mark holds his parties. At one of them Andrew meets Sam (Natalie Portman) and
the two start a rather diffident courtship — she brings him to her home, albeit
while her mom (whom I can’t find identified on the imdb.com page for this film
but who turns in a marvelous
performance that reminded me of Lily Tomlin) is there, and she leads him to her
bedroom but says, “We’re not going to make out” — though eventually they do have sex and, albeit in the course of a two-day
relationship, Andrew falls hard enough that at the end of the film [am I really spoiling it for you?] Andrew decides to stay in the
Garden State. It’s one of those films that’s more a series of vignettes than a
coherent story, and in the film’s final journey Mark insists on tagging along
with Our Couple even though he’s almost literally a third wheel (Mark’s
transport in the Garden State is a World War II-vintage motorcycle, complete
with sidecar, he inherited from his grandfather, and Mark sits in the sidecar
while Sam clings to Andrew in classic biker-chick fashion) to an old boat
parked on the ground in the middle of a geological excavation that derailed
some developer’s plan to build a shopping mall. (Charles said that really dated the movie: today malls are being torn down or
converted to other uses, not built.)
We’re surprised when the man living there
answers their knock with a baby in his arms, and even more surprised when the
kid’s mother is living with him; we expected him to be a drug dealer and a
recluse, and instead he gives Mark a gift from Andrew: a necklace containing
one of those little mini-marble games in which you were supposed to roll a
metal ball into a hole. Mark, who makes his living digging graves at the
cemetery where Andrew’s mom was buried, stole it from the corpse and eventually
— in this quirky, roundabout way — gave it to Andrew on the ground that it was
better that he have it than it be buried with her. Along the way we’ve seen
Andrew visit a doctor (a marvelous straight-comic performance by Ian Holm) who
tells him he can stop taking all the meds his psychiatrist father has prescribed
him and he should seek out a therapist who isn’t his dad. (I was amused that when Andrew shows up for
his appointment the receptionist at the doctor’s office does not ask him for his date of birth. It’s standard
practice for medical personnel to do that in order to confirm a patient’s ID!) Garden
State is a quite amusing and heart-warming
movie of the sort that had a vogue in the early 2000’s but has virtually
disappeared from the screen today; it’s also marked by an excellent use of
music, including songs by Simon and Garfunkel (“The Only Living Boy in New
York”) and the late, great Nick Drake (“One of These Things First”). It’s been
compared to The Graduate, though
other films from that period (notably Tadpole, which also used “The Only Living Boy in New York” —
albeit in a cover by Everything but the Girl rather than the Simon and
Garfunkel original heard here) came closer to The Graduate than this one: Zach Braff may be playing a young naïf but he doesn’t get involved in a cross-generational sexual relationship the way the
central characters in The Graduate
and Tadpole do. Still, it’s a lot
of fun and makes me curious about Braff’s other directorial efforts — which
include two more feature films, Wish I Was Here (2014) and Going in Style (2017), as well as some TV episodes and shorts.
