pretentious (spoilers maybe?)

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2004)

An intelligent friend of mine that I thought good taste recommended this movie to me. It was only later that I would find out that she was a fan of the sitcom, Friends. If I had known, I would have taken her suggestion with a grain of salt.
With that said, this movie was awful. It was a capitalization on the success of movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lost in Translation (an actually great film). Where I felt that Eternal Sunshine was a movie that looked good and was well done, but lacked the mysteries of the universe, I felt that Garden State neither looked good, contained the mysteries of the universe, or was well done, and managed to make me question whether or not love is something real or just a farce because of horrible movies like this that bastardize it.
The dialogue was so cliché and predictable that I found myself laughing towards the end. "when I'm with you.....I'm home" comes to mind, and there is a scene where Braff and Portman kiss in the rain and then Braff contorts his face for several seconds in pained revaliation of the mysteries of the universe. The film also attempts to add artistic shots at arbitrary moments. In one scene they are standing in a pool and the camera focuses on a light that grows from under the pool eventually taking over the shot while Braff and Portman just kind of look towards the camera as if they're posing.
There were several repetitions of bad imagery and symbolism as well as thematic motives. One sickening one that comes to mind is the whole "do something unique, that you've never done before" that rears it's ugly head again at the end. "Oh!" the viewer thinks....."I've heard that before.....this movie is so deep!"
There is nothing profound about this movie. It is not honest. It is formulaic. It follows the Joseph Campbell model of the journey of the hero perfectly. A hero leaves the safe world, reluctantly, in search of the elixer. He sleeps with the mother figure, comes to the abyss (literally in this movie), and finds the actual elixer which is not the one he expects, than returns home, master of both worlds. The reason this is important is that all stories follow this model, if you adhere to the idea, however, it's the variations in the model that can make a story unique. This movie varies nothing. I almost wondered if the screen writer (Braff apparently) was laughing to himself as he wrote this cheesy typical script.
It's OK to make a film that doesn't have the mysteries of the universe in it, however, it's not OK to make one that pretends to.