Garden StateIt's a difficult thing to know who you are when you're feelings are hidden away from yourself and others. Sometimes you wear the mask, and sometimes the mask wears you. That "mask" is the one which has been administered for years to struggling actor and refugee from his home in New Jersey, Andrew "Large" Largeman (Zach Braff, who also writes and directs). One might think that when we sneak a peak at his medicine cabinet--only to find it literally full of prescription medicine--that he is troubled, that he is in great pain. The real problem is that Andrew hasn't felt anything for a long time...too long.
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Andrew's long-delayed return home is the result of the unfortunate passing of his mother--who morbidly drowned in the bathroom she had only recently refurbished. His relationship with his father (Ian Holm) is strained, with the awkward breach of doctor-patient relationship present since his father is also his psychiatrist, who has been prescribing a heavy cocktail of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics--like lithium and depakote--to his son since his mother's unfortunate accident when Andrew was nine. Andrew has been running for a long time, since his father finally shipped him off to boarding school, working as a waiter to detestable yuppies in a Vietnamese restaurant while waiting for another acting gig. The role he is best remembered for is the portrayal of a quarterback with mental retardation. By and large, Andrew has been emotionally unplugged from the world--he even finds that he is unable to shed a tear at his own mother's funeral. It's not as though he should be blamed, but he recognizes the problem and decides to give up the drug he has been taking to keep him level. (By the way, don't try this at home, kids.) He wades through the past of his old stomping grounds--a community which is decidedly the equivalent of the "shallow end"--where the kids he went to school with haven't really grown up...they've just gotten older and grabbed the first jobs that didn't need a college degree. Pursuing the trend of awkwardness, the man who will end up burying his mother is a former acquaintance from home, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who also invites him to a party, which primarily consists of him and his friends getting drunk and stoned, making out with stray girls they brought in with the promise of drugs. Andrew finds himself situated in uncomfortable conversations with Mark, his mom, and her young "knight in shining armor", a captive audience to recitations of seductive turns of phrase in Klingon. His decision to seek some medical counsel for his periodic headaches leads him to a surreptitious meeting with a pretty, weird, and pretty weird young woman named Sam (Natalie Portman). Her eagerness to engage the evidently closed-off Andrew is foreign to him, but not unwelcome; even if she is a self-professed compulsive liar, Andrew hesitantly trusts her more and more. She invites him to partake of the music she regards as life-altering--the excellent band, The Shins, who have already been introduced to the score of Garden State, implying that the music holds more resonance for Andrew than he cares to admit. Before long, he's giving her a ride on his bike--but not in the sidecar, she's too proud for that--to introduce him to her family, and Andrew gets to understand where her adorable nuttiness originates.
Sam turns out to be the heart of Garden State--not even just the metaphorical one of love and romance; she effectively motivates Andrew, or at least supports him, as he tries to jump start his life, pumping the veritable blood through his body to do so. She treats Andrew and his problems as genuine, feeling sorry for him at his mother's passing, even if he struggles with it due to his medications still in his system, and doesn't use him as just another enabler like his other so-called friends, the majority of them self-serving scumbags. As Andrew slowly comes out of his emotional coma, it is not as though it were a sudden epiphany, but a realization that life is happening around him, and he starts to take part, to be himself as he learns who "he" is. He recalls the events with clarity which resulted in his mother's paralysis, a "freak accident" due to a faulty latch on a dishwasher--and bad timing--when Andrew had a tantrum as a boy, something which was misconstrued and misdiagnosed for the rest of his life. One suspects that Andrew feels guilt over this--and by association, her death by drowning, since she became a paraplegic as a result of the childhood accident--but that he also recognizes the unfairness of it all, that his life should have been influenced so significantly by what he describes as a "quarter inch of plastic". In a way, Andrew has been drowning for years, his emotions submerged below the "happy pills" dosed to him by his dad, the shrink. Andrew's father more than likely blames not even him, but the situation, which he feels resulted in the deterioration of his vision of a "happy family", something Andrew can not even recall; something he only recognizes from his inclusion into Sam's life, that warmth. His only thoughts of home have been that it is some imaginary place you envision, and your family is comprised simply of like-minded people who suffer the same delusion of it. What sets Garden State apart from the varied impressions of the "real life" in a small town is while it may be occasionally silly--even borderline ridiculous, like the "hotel scene"--there is an overwhelming authenticity to the way Andrew and Sam converse, how they get to know one another, and the world they inhabit: our world. Andrew may not cop to it, but he is seeking out that moment when the skies part and the world around him becomes one reborn out of real human emotion and all that. But there is something about the message of Garden State which reminds me of the scene when Mark gives (returns?) the necklace his mother was buried in to Andrew--which is also a little puzzle game--after he drags them on a strange adventure through the eponymous Garden State to buy it back. Maybe Mark does this because he feels guilty about his unsavory--one of many--ways to leech out a few bucks to finance his marijuana habit and Desert Storm trading card collection, but it is a token, a remembrance of Andrew's time back home. It is not a moment which swells with emotion, but it is another step along the road for Andrew to reclaim his life, the walk to get back to whole.
Recommended for: Fans of a tender and heartwarming drama of a young man trying to swim to the surface of his own soul, and feel that he can connect with someone special again and be true to himself, and to love himself and others.
Sam turns out to be the heart of Garden State--not even just the metaphorical one of love and romance; she effectively motivates Andrew, or at least supports him, as he tries to jump start his life, pumping the veritable blood through his body to do so. She treats Andrew and his problems as genuine, feeling sorry for him at his mother's passing, even if he struggles with it due to his medications still in his system, and doesn't use him as just another enabler like his other so-called friends, the majority of them self-serving scumbags. As Andrew slowly comes out of his emotional coma, it is not as though it were a sudden epiphany, but a realization that life is happening around him, and he starts to take part, to be himself as he learns who "he" is. He recalls the events with clarity which resulted in his mother's paralysis, a "freak accident" due to a faulty latch on a dishwasher--and bad timing--when Andrew had a tantrum as a boy, something which was misconstrued and misdiagnosed for the rest of his life. One suspects that Andrew feels guilt over this--and by association, her death by drowning, since she became a paraplegic as a result of the childhood accident--but that he also recognizes the unfairness of it all, that his life should have been influenced so significantly by what he describes as a "quarter inch of plastic". In a way, Andrew has been drowning for years, his emotions submerged below the "happy pills" dosed to him by his dad, the shrink. Andrew's father more than likely blames not even him, but the situation, which he feels resulted in the deterioration of his vision of a "happy family", something Andrew can not even recall; something he only recognizes from his inclusion into Sam's life, that warmth. His only thoughts of home have been that it is some imaginary place you envision, and your family is comprised simply of like-minded people who suffer the same delusion of it. What sets Garden State apart from the varied impressions of the "real life" in a small town is while it may be occasionally silly--even borderline ridiculous, like the "hotel scene"--there is an overwhelming authenticity to the way Andrew and Sam converse, how they get to know one another, and the world they inhabit: our world. Andrew may not cop to it, but he is seeking out that moment when the skies part and the world around him becomes one reborn out of real human emotion and all that. But there is something about the message of Garden State which reminds me of the scene when Mark gives (returns?) the necklace his mother was buried in to Andrew--which is also a little puzzle game--after he drags them on a strange adventure through the eponymous Garden State to buy it back. Maybe Mark does this because he feels guilty about his unsavory--one of many--ways to leech out a few bucks to finance his marijuana habit and Desert Storm trading card collection, but it is a token, a remembrance of Andrew's time back home. It is not a moment which swells with emotion, but it is another step along the road for Andrew to reclaim his life, the walk to get back to whole.
Recommended for: Fans of a tender and heartwarming drama of a young man trying to swim to the surface of his own soul, and feel that he can connect with someone special again and be true to himself, and to love himself and others.