'i hope you liked me'

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 2004)

I'm not quite sure what 'Garden State' is in terms of film. It's not your classic film about alienation, or about being young, or about dealing with death, or drugs, or love. Really, it's a film about one character trying to be anything other than numb and the rest of it is all in the little details.
I think it's probably better not to know what it's about because the whole film is shot so that the dialogue explains what the characters have been doing five minutes after they started acting it. Really though, although the story is decent, it's not one of the films better features due to the fact that the middle/endish fall into the traps of quick realization, connection, 'yoda-esque character which explains life to all' which go against the whole point of making a film which strives towards realism.
However, the film has some beautiful little details -- every couple of minutes the actors hit a point where they just do it up right (peter sarsgard, why aren't we paying more attention to his work?), or a line is brilliantly written (the main character tells a group of kids 'see you later' right before he's about to take a hit of ecstacy), or the move of a camera catches something beautifully (the light off of a pool taking the foreground of a shot making the whole frame celestial). Really, these snapshots were the film for me and there's a couple more that make this film worth seeing once, maybe twice.
Zach Braff really channels his inner auteur in this film, suggesting one day he's going to direct something far better once he gets past his fuzzy, pink cheeked youth self-consciousness as a filmmaker. Natalie Portman, although still suffering from her need to please big emotional moments over trying to capture a character, has great chemistry with Braff and hits her lines enough to get over her room for improvement.
Past that, the soundtrack is excellent (i recommend just buying the cd even if you don't plan on seeing the movie), this movie can be considered a love story and it can be considered a comedy, and I really don't understand why they're calling it 'this summers' Lost in Translation.' It has enough to separate itself from the suburban alienation lot (Ice Storm, Virgin Suicides, Ordinary People, Pieces of April)-- and despite the script problems, it really does stand on its own as a great, little film.