too quirky and clever for its own good...

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2005)

It must take a lot of courage for Hollywood's successful, glamorous, pseudo-intellectuals to make fun of average people and their pathetic lives and values. Like Sofia Coppola's "look at how clever we are" Lost In Translation, Zach Braff's GARDEN STATE is another smug, superior and condescending exercise in how a disaffected man  with the help of an adorable, and incomprehensibly available, girl  can mock the hapless and hopeless and ridiculous while reconnecting with a world not worthy of him. (A suggestion: let's save these guys the trouble, tell them they are too smart and sensitive for this world and shoot them.)
Excessively quirky, as these films usually are, and hopelessly episodic, the film wants to be cool and wickedly "inside"  a diversionary piece of satirical entertainment for the tuned-out, too-cool zombies who will delight in the laughs the film scores at the expense of, restrain yourself, a truly bad singer's rendition of "Three Times a Lady" sung at a funeral, a horny sight seeing dog, etc. It's all here. No obvious joke has been overlooked.
Every scene, every set, every moment has a distracting "cool" element (the motorcycle with a sidecar, the house overrun by a habitrail, the mansion devoid of furniture in which characters get around in a golf cart, the abandoned boat at the bottom of a quarry). And just to make sure that you'll stay awake: the soundtrack cranks in to signal every scene change, every emotional beat.
You might be able to entertain yourself through the movie by randomly moving props around in your head: what if Zach got around town in a golf cart and the former classmate who invented silent Velcro (too, too funny  not!) moved around his empty mansion in the motorcycle. Or lived in the boat at the bottom of the quarry. Nothing has any real reason for being in the movie  and that includes the characters. And when our filmmakers can no longer trust an audience to watch even a simple drama unless it is festooned with bells and whistles, we have much bigger problems than whether or not one overly medicated man finds love and rejoins the world.