A flawed film with a wonderful premise

Rating: 7/10 (30 January 2009)

Fully written and directed by its starring actor, Zach Braff, this film tells the story of Andrew Largeman (Braff), a young man that has been on prescribed medication for emotional control ever since an incident involving his mother at the age of nine convinced his father, a psychiatrist, that a combination of drugs and, later, attending a boarding school would be best for him. After many years of detachment and now in his mid-twenties, he briefly returns to his hometown in New Jersey for his mother's funeral; during his stay, he reunites with old friends whose personal and professional lives have taken curious turns and meets Samantha, a lively, heart-on-the-sleeve girl who is everything he is not.
Garden State is about life and living; it portrays Andrew's journey from almost two decades of absolute drug-induced numbness to learning how to feel again: how to laugh, how to cry, how to scream, how to care. In this sense, it is a hymn to life, showing us how, whether good or bad, it is everything we've got, and how human beings must learn to accept that and make the best out of it.
However, despite having a wonderful base concept, this film has some flaws that ultimately make it a lot less remarkable than it promises to be in its early parts, its one major letdown being, of course, its old-fashioned, unrealistic ending: having been meds-free for only about four days, it makes no sense for Andrew's progression as a character to decidedly shackle himself to a girl whom he had known for an even shorter amount of time. For the down-to-earth viewer looking for some realistic dissection of the human mind and nature, Andrew's happy ending with Sam is not romantic: on the contrary, seeing our protagonist jump from one prison (his medication) to another (a love interest) without allowing himself the time to readjust to life on his own two feet, as well as get his newly-found feelings in order, is simply downright disappointing. This "lovey-dovey", naive ending feels displaced in a supposedly "alternative" film, and ruins whatever "lesson" you might have extracted from the previous 90-something minutes.
Unrealism, however, is not Garden State's only downside: the film is also somewhat diffuse in its essence, sometimes appearing to lose itself (and, consequently, the viewers) and forgetting what it is that it is trying to convey at a given moment; in short, you are likely to often find yourself wondering exactly what point they are attempting to make -- and, sadly, rarely getting a satisfactory answer, because thought-provoking subjects are often taken on and almost immediately put aside without any sort of closure. On a different note, it must be noted that our protagonist is not directly to blame for most of the things going wrong in his life; his circumstances have begun to mold themselves (or rather, impose themselves on him) when he was merely a child, and therefore were always somewhat beyond his control. This, in a way, excludes the need for personal, inner redemption right from the start, consequently weakening his character and/or his chance for emotional progress, an important factor to any protagonist that is further neglected in the already mentioned fluffy ending.
Still, many good points are undeniable; the film is well-directed and well-acted, with Natalie Portman's Sam coming off convincingly annoying in an overly cute way as desired, and the soundtrack is simply superb: Braff has managed to bring many obscure, alternative (and, may I say, awesome) artists and bands together (Zero 7, The Shins, Frou Frou, Remy Zero, the amazing Coldplay and Cary Brothers,...), and the result is awe-deserving. In fact, were it not for its seldom derailing and its truly mischosen and unoriginal ending, Garden State could be a 10/10 film: after all, it does explore the great and never overused premise of life and learning to feel it in all of its forms.