Or, The All-Consuming Importance of Zach Braff.

Rating: 1/10 (15 September 2004)

Even though TV actor Zach Braff writes, directs, and stars in *Garden State*, I suppose we really ought to blame Dustin Hoffman for it, for *The Graduate* hangs heavily over this movie, like a self-obsessed pall. Zach Braff's Andrew Largeman is yet another representation of the gradual declension of the American male in popular culture, starting with Hoffman's morose little Benjamin back in the Sixties. 40 years after *The Graduate*, who are the hot male stars? Effeminate wisps like Leonardo DiCaprio, puny aesthetes like Tobey Maguire, zonked mumblers like Jake Gyllenhaal -- these, and all the others like them, trace their ancestry directly back to Benjamin. Triumph of the Nerds. Post-macho, post-masculine, hell, even post-penile. Lee Marvin and John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable spin in their graves.
An apt segue: *Garden State* concerns itself with graves. In one scene we watch, unconvinced, while one of Andrew's old high school buddies -- a gravedigger -- removes a trinket from a freshly dug grave. What are supposed to do with this information? What purpose does it serve, other than making us question why Andrew would be on friendly terms with such a ghoul? The fact is, it's merely one sequence in a dozen in which Braff begs for our attention by throwing up meaningless quirkiness on the screen. A dog humps Andrew's leg in a doctor's waiting room. A guy in full knight's armor -- including beaver and helmet -- eats a bowl of cereal. Indeed, these irritating mannerisms are inaugurated from the opening frames: in a dream sequence, Andrew sits emotionless while his airplane is in the process of crashing. While his fellow passengers panic, he calmly adjusts the overhead air conditioning. Then he wakes up to a sterile, blinding white bedroom, lying half-awake on white bedsheets, listening to his father on the answering machine inform him that his mother has just drowned in the bathtub. Our hero closes his eyes.
Essentially, what Braff is doing is attempting to obfuscate the adolescent nature of his material with postmodern distractions. Boil this baby down, and you get your basic Guy-Comes-To-Terms-With-His-Parents-And-Gets-A-Pretty-Girlfriend-At-The-End story. Most of us tried to write this novel when we were in our late teens or early twenties; fortunately, most of us gave up when the unoriginality of it occurred to us in an embarrassing flash. Braff, however, is not cursed with such self-awareness. He apparently believes that if he out-Andersons Wes Anderson, presents an unwavering moody mien, and keeps the background noisy with the guitar strumming of maudlin pop groups like Coldplay, he'll achieve instant credibility as an "artist". Unfortunately, he has succeeded in this, as the reviews from the kids here at IMDb attest.
Even worse, a fair amount of professional film critics have also taken him seriously, perhaps because he refrains from resorting to flatulence jokes during the film. Boy, we really have learned to settle for less, haven't we? For some of us, however, fraudulence is not necessarily an improvement on flatulence. Some of us also dare to assert that ONE Wes Anderson is more than enough. But Braff is not even honest with his indie-film borrowings: the sappy, trite ending, which I won't spoil, reveals his squishy Hollywood center, his desire for wide multiplex release, his quest for mainstream success. The big-name casting also gives the game away: many of the faces are familiar, with two heavy-hitters -- Ian Holm and Natalie Portman (the latter slumming here for indie cred) -- in prominent roles. My growing dislike of *Garden State* turned to sharp disgust when I witnessed Zach Braff, as Holm's son, lecture Holm -- who is supposed to be a psychiatrist (!) -- about the importance of communication in their relationship. Wisdom from the mouths of babes, I guess. Or perhaps arrogance from the mouths of self-centered twits who can't relinquish even one good line of dialog to one of the century's great actors. Understandably, Holm looks rather insulted throughout the proceedings.
An unforgiving 1 star out of 10. Avoid.