Saturday, January 9, 2010

Garden State - A Reconsideration


Garden State, starring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, came out at a time when I was transitioning from high school to college. I had just graduated San Rafael High and was enrolled to take my fall semester at College of Marin. I was embarking on my official journey into adulthood. Then the film was released. I was 18 at the time.

While it didn’t have the earthshaking resonance of a film like American Beauty, Garden State still spoke to a great many of us young adults. It captured a generational zeitgeist: Doped up on prescription medication, beset by familial pain, we became catatonic in the face of reality. This film was here to sober us up.

The film is about an out-of-work L.A. actor named Andrew Largeman (Braff). One day he is summoned by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) to return home in New Jersey for the funeral of his mother. Upon his arrival, Largeman reconnects with old friends Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jesse (Armando Riesco) and meets cute with Sam (Portman), a truly unusual oddball who has a backyard cemetery for her pets and knows just where to kick the dogs when they start humping your leg. Because he left his drugs back in California, Largeman slowly starts to emerge from his drug-induced haze to feel genuine emotions again and finally deal with the troubles stemming from his youth.

Seeing the film again, I'm struck by how sharp Braff's visual style is. Working for the first time on a feature-length film with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, Braff uses a lot of symmetrical compositions to emphasize Largeman's near-comatose state. One of the best is the wide close up of Largeman staring at himself in the mirror, only there is a slit in the middle so the two halves of his face don't match up completely. Visually, this is an excellent choice.

On its theatrical release, Garden State was frequently compared to The Graduate for its generational resonance and Beautiful Girls for its similar coming-of-age plotline and the casting of Portman as the love interest. Actually, the film that Garden State has the most in common with is the 1988 Oscar-nominated dramedy The Accidental Tourist starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. Both films are about protagonists trying to break free from years of emotional paralysis and both include a happy-go-lucky love interest that are instrumental in the heroes’ journey.


In Tourist, Hurt plays a travel writer named Macon Leary who has lost his son several years ago in a fast-food restaurant shooting. When Macon takes his dog to the kennel to stay overnight while he goes on a business trip, he meets Muriel Pritchett (Davis), the woman who’ll slowly pull him out of his funk. Apart from the details of the story, The Accidental Tourist and Garden State follow very similar plotlines and character arcs.

I mentioned earlier that both films had a happy-go-lucky love interest that’s instrumental in the hero’s journey. Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club coined the term “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe this type of love interest. His definition of the MPDG is a girl that “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” The definition was expanded in a later article to include the adjectives “bubbly and shallow.” Rabin was correct in using the MPDG in his original article to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character Clair Colburn in Elizabethtown. Hers was an MPDG of the worst kind: The one who doesn't know personal boundaries. Portman’s portrayal of Sam, however, is not an MPDG.


Sam is neither shallow nor bubbly, and while she does inspire the “brooding soulful young” Largeman to get a life, she doesn’t exists solely to serve him. She has her own follies and foibles. For one, she’s a pathological liar. On Sam’s first meeting with Largeman in a hospital, she lies about waiting for someone else. When Largeman asks why she lies, she replies that she doesn’t know and can’t help it. "It's like a tic," she describes. As it turns out, Sam wears protective headgear for when she works because she occasionally gets seizures. When her mother plays a tape of a young Sam ice-skating in a dinosaur costume, she shies away from the TV, embarrassed by the memory of a time when she wasn’t handicapped. Sam is person with an inner life as well as an outer one.

I sincerely hope Braff returns to the director’s chair. Since Garden State, he has starred in the mediocre The Last Kiss and Chicken Little. According to IMDb, he’s still on tap to helm Open Hearts, a remake of Susanne Bier’s 2002 Danish film of the same name. He’s also going to write and executive produce Andrew Henry’s Meadow, the story of a young boy’s hyperactive imagination attracting like-minded children.

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