A "debut" movie... shows as much promise as if you handed 1 million and an indie soundtrack to any film school student...

Rating: 6/10 (1 October 2005)

Garden State is Zach Braff's first feature length movie that was directed and written by him, and it shows. Like many directorial debuts, it is bloated with ill-fitting but "cool" tangents and subplots, is a semi-autobiography, and is a coming-of-age film. But the strings making the puppet dance to a cute indie soundtrack have never been so visible.
Garden State is generic. Flip through it's scenes of quirky-ness, medieval knight fast food workers, and an adopted brother who is searching for the criminal who defiled his Gamecube, and you have a bunch of ideas that could've been found in any college (or for that matter, high school) kid's "cool ideas" notebook. Wouldn't it be cool if a doctor had a diploma on a wall? Apparently it's more important than presenting the story. The jokes never seem to follow a theme, but Braff is reluctant to cut out any of his "cool" ideas, thus making it an empty exercise in quirky showmanship rather than a honest attempt at using humor to make a point.
It's these tangents that really hurt what has been described as the "heartfelt" and "honest" themes in the movie. It would also help if they weren't delivered in such a by-the-numbers style. Garden State's "serious" scenes tread no new territory, and are an exercise in the mundane. "I feel so f*cking numb," says Braff to his cold father. So did I: I was watching Director/Writer Braff on his soapbox delivering The Theme of the Movie rather than unfolding it myself. The character arcs are handed to you in such a way that you realize what is going to happen as soon as the characters are introduced, and feel let down that a quirky film did not lend any of it's twists to actual character building, leaving them squandered in pointless sight gags.
However, the movie has struck a resonant chord with teenage audiences, and has critics praising Braff's debut, which according to them, shows promise for a new filmmaker. If only any kid who wanted to be a filmmaker could have contacts and money at his beck and call... we could have hundreds of Garden States. One thinks that showing promise would be doing something new, not traversing the flat, empty plain of half-developed teenage idea wasteland.