A graveyard of horrible writing

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2004)

This is the first time I've felt compelled to write comments for a movie on IMDb-and it is not for any good reasons. Garden State was watchable up until Natalie Portman entered the picture. The odd thing is that I usually enjoy Portman's performances. So what was the problem? The writing! Portman's character was so atrociously written: a cross between a cute bubble gum teenager and a young adult trying so hard to be interesting and far too sentimental. Everything else from then on was downhill.
Braff is a semi-decent director but is one of the worst writers ever. Even the shots that were intriguing, though, really owe little to Braff and more to Lawrence Sher. Braff attempts to cram in far too many idiosyncrasies, quirks, and melodramatic character traits. ***Spoilers*** Largeman (Braff) is an actor who paralyzed his recently deceased mother and has a father / psychiatrist who has overly medicated Largeman since boyhood. Then Sam (Portman) is an epileptic and compulsive liar who used to ice skate but now makes funny noises whenever she is nervous and buries pet hamsters in the pet cemetery in her backyard. When you actually write or say all of this out loud, it really sounds so absurd
Which is at the crux of the problem for Garden State-it is all so absurd, absurdly stylized and plotted, and nothing rings true to life. Like so many acts in Hollywood, whether it's a Coppola family tie or some other relation, it's obvious Braff was able to make this project happen simply because of his mediocre fame and heritage connections, which are all too obvious in a cast where it seems everyone is Jewish, and yet again we have the typical scripted scene in American cinema with a random spiel about what it's like to be in that 'God's People' religion. ----3/10