Absurdly overrated

Rating: 4/10 (13 September 2005)

Zach Braff's directorial debut proves one thing: he is just as capable of delivering boring, run-of-the-mill Holyywood tripe as anyone.
GARDEN STATE is not by any means a bad movie. It also isn't a good one. It just sort of sits there. There's plenty of phony emotion and forced "heartfelt" exposition, but at the end, there's nothing to it all. Braff appears to have come up with a handful of ideas he thought would make cool scenes in a movie, and then struggled to write a movie around them. There are a few passably interesting moments, but mostly we've seen this movie before. Over and over and over again.
Braff's emotionless performance is mind-numbing. I understand that his character is supposed to have been encouraged to bury his emotions by his equally monotone father (Ian Holm), but he is not a good enough actor to convey the buried emotions lying within. He just acts like an apathetic bore, and his moment of "epiphany" toward the end comes out of nowhere, and seems to disappear as quickly as it came. The superb Holm is given a brutally one-note character, and can do nothing to bring any sort of depth to it.
The hit-or-miss Natalie Portman doesn't do either here. Her performance is as uneven as her character. Is she a quirky young woman with more insight than she knows what to do with? Is she an immature kid who is desperately grasping at her disappearing childhood? Or is she just an idiot? Neither she nor Braff can make up their mind, and the movie ends without us having ever figured her character out. That wouldn't be so bad, but we are expected to accept one of the screen's most ridiculously inappropriate audience-pleasing endings. Not since PRETTY WOMAN has a movie been so horrendously derailed by its own final moments. The utter lack of character development (the characters are barely there in the first place) makes the ending all the more insulting to our intelligence. These people would NEVER behave this way.
GARDEN STATE is the kind of movie critics adore. A little semi-obscure sleeper they can pretend they took part in discovering. I find this kind of movie to be offensive. It doesn't play with our emotions, it tries to convince us we SHOULD feel a certain way, by forcing on us the outcome it wants to reach, despite the fact that nothing in the plot has led us to believe it is what would (or SHOULD) HAPPEN.
That's called cheating. And GARDEN STATE is nowhere near good enough to excuse that.