Meh

Rating: 3/10 (24 February 2005)

A lot of people laud movies like this one for not containing tons of explosions, meaningless sex, and kindergarten-level plotting. But let's face it; if you have trouble finding intelligent, stimulating movies you're just not looking hard enough. "Garden State" was not good enough to justify all the praise that was heaped upon it - nor was it good enough to really keep me interested.
That's not to say I thought the movie was a total bust: Some scenes were handled perfectly. Examples: Zach Braff wakes up after a night of partying to find a man in a suit of armor staring at him; that's kind of what I expect to happen when I wake up confused and exhausted after a long night. Zach Braff's oddball millionaire friend playing "Dodge the flaming arrow," or driving around his mansion in a golf cart. The focus in the beginning on the New Jersey DeNiro thing. Those were all good - very good. They just weren't in a very good movie.
A few things just worked against it: The meandering, non-pace of the movie's beginning really faltered once Natalie Portman showed up. It suddenly seemed like this oddball dramedy about a guy trying to get back in touch with a world he'd left behind was being shoehorned into a fairly run-of-the-mill "Quiet loner meets outgoing girl" love story. I really didn't feel like Zach Braff had earned the right to have his character say, "You changed my life," to Natalie Portman at the end of the film. Also, absolutely too many scenes were dominated by fast-motion camera effects and super-hip indie music.
If Zach Braff makes another movie - either a more focused love story or a less focused, existentialist-about-town story - he could hit gold. He's an assured director and a talented writer. The problem is that, contrary to popular opinion, he made this movie a little too in line with the mainstream - there's nothing revolutionary about a lukewarm relationship between two odd characters set to hip, contemporary music.