Coming out of the dark

Rating: 9/10 (8 April 2009)

I finally decided to watch this indie because it had been compared on many points to another film I love, called THIS SPACE BETWEEN US. Both films are about how tragedy can cause a young person to withdraw and shut down emotionally, and how one comes to the point of either "do or die" when faced with the decision to live again or just exist.
Andrew Largeman (director and actor Zach Braff) is an up and coming actor in LA who is paying his dues working in a Vietnamese restaurant. He seems normal at first glance, but Andrew is often plagued with severe headaches and nightmares of himself dying in a horrific plane crash...but not really caring.
One day he gets a call from his father (the great Ian Holm), who also happens to be a psychiatrist. Mother has died unexpectedly, from drowning in the bathtub. As Andrew makes the trip back to his old home turf in New Jersey, attends the funeral, and is reunited with old friends (including Peter Saarsgard (sp?) he hasn't seen in a decade, we learn that he has become estranged from his father. We learn that Andrew, at age 9, had a role in the tragic accident that left his mother paralyzed from the waist down. We learn that although it is not really Andrew's fault, that a defective kitchen appliance was to blame, Andrew has been living with guilt and depression ever since, and that Andrew's father DOES blame his son. For one reason or another, Mr. Largeman has placed his son on several antidepressant and antipsychotic medications, insisting that they are for Andrew's well being.
While staying with his Dad, Andrew becomes acquainted with a bubbly young woman named Samantha (Natalie Portman), and their friendship soon becomes love, and Andrew makes the first real decision he has ever made for his life: to stop the medications and try to "feel" again, even if it's pain and guilt over the fate of his mother, and the misery in the relationship he has with his domineering father.
I haven't watched a whole lot of SCRUBS or much of the other films Braff has been in, but I was very impressed with his acting and directing. GARDEN STATE is another pleasant "people" film, a small and quiet little story. The ending seems a little surreal, as does the plane crash sequence at the start. Speculation has been made that Andrew died in that crash and that Sam was in the telephone booth crying because she had heard about the crash. The white setting of the final scene does have a dreamlike quality.
My own interpretation: Andrew did get off that plane and decide to stay with Sam, and that the whiteness of the final scene was symbolic of Andrew coming out of his world of depression, numbness and misery into the "light". It was effectively poignant.
The "lightness" at the beginning, in Andrew's room as his dad was phoning him with bad news? A sterile and phony "light" that his dad imposed on him with the meds.
It gets an A from me.