This is your brain off drugs

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 2004)

Okay, here's the concept. Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) has been on antidepressants for 16 years, ever since he was a young boy, and thus has not been able to deal with some fundamental issues in his life. Suddenly, his mother passes away, and he returns to Newark, New Jersey, to attend her funeral and face his past.
Only he doesn't, really, and that's one of the problems with this film. The media hype leads you to believe Largeman must deal with some deep dark secret, and you expect a major confrontation with his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm). We get neither of these things.
What we get instead is an array of characters that are each, in their way, as weird and peculiar as Largeman himself. I guess the idea is that, no matter how strange one's circumstances may be, normal is relative. (Hey, that would make a good tag line.)
But that's like saying that all families are dysfunctional. It's a truism, a self-evident truth. And besides, Tolstoy said it already, and better, in the opening line of "Anna Karenina"" "Happy families are all alike. Unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way."
Don't get me wrong. The cast of "Garden State" is wonderful. As Largeman, Zach Braff is physically reminiscent of a young John Ritter in his "Three's Company" glory days. As the mother of one of his friends, Jean Smart is a dead ringer for Shirley Jones in "The Partridge Family". Ian Holm is in fine form as always. And Natalie Portman shines as compulsive liar Sam.
There are some funny gags along the way, too. You haven't lived until you've heard "Three Times a Lady" sung with a Jersey accent. And there is a rather unusual dog trick you've probably never seen before, and probably won't care to see again.
Ultimately, however, all this weirdness becomes too much to absorb, and this critic's brain simply shut off. To put it another way, all this dysfunctionality is ... well, dysfunctional. "Garden State" is just too damn quirky for its own good.