Enjoyable Mediocrity

Rating: Null/10 (9 November 2004)

I'll be honest. I did not want to like Garden State. I held it at arms length because it seemed, from the previews and gushing reviews by scenesters, like it was trying a little too hard to be cool. I don't like movies that try to be cool (Pi, for instance); I like movies that are cool.
Anyway, I went to see it anyway, hadn't seen anything in a while and figured it was my best bet at the local theaters. Did I dislike it? Not really, Garden State is enjoyable, even if it drags in parts. Did I like it? Not really. The movie simply left me ambivalent. The experience of watching Zach Braff and Natalie Portman fight their personal demons and find true love was not painful, nor was it revelatory. It was a nice enough way to spend a couple hours, but I could devise both better and worse ways to spend that time. So, yes, Garden State is an enjoyable flick that really had no staying power in my mind. This films differs from, say, Kill Bill or A Home at the End of the World, to use two new examples, in that respect; those movies remained in my brain for days as I picked them apart. I left the theater after seeing them and I felt that I had experienced something. They affected me bodily. Garden State did not. It is enjoyable mediocrity.
Why? The quirks in this film give it appeal that most romantic comedies lack; they make the story interesting (had they been left out Garden State would have been a very bad movie). I find that interesting inasmuch as I dreaded the quirks. I thought quirks meant the story was trying to hard to be "different" and "hip." Turns out, the more surreal moments are woven organically into the film; they do not sit out like sore thumbs. They make sense in the context of the movie.
Natalie Portman also makes the movie more enjoyable that it would have been without her. She is an angel and, in a quasi-reprise of her role in Beautiful Girls, she won my heart again. I'd given up hope on her and Garden State showed me again why I loved her in the first place.
That said, the rest of the movie is less compelling. Zach Braff is rather un-interesting in the lead, but I have to give him credit for getting Portman to play his love interest. If it worked for him, there's hope for the rest of us. The story, on the whole, is also lack-luster.
It's un-original and, for my tastes, strangely derivative of Rick Moody's completely un-related novel. (It's interesting that the movie and book have nothing to do with one another, yet they both have the same name and are about 20-somethings with mental health problems. Either young head cases are common to New Jersey or Braff decided to write his own narratively dissimilar but tonally similar version of Moody's novel). The movie also under-uses Ian Holm, a terrific actor who should be allowed more range than is given him here.
Again, Garden State is not terrible, nor is it good. It is so middle of the road, it might as well be a set of parallel yellow lines.