Angst Justified

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2004)

The desire to be pretentious and different has hit young people like a plague, and Garden State is merely the newest strain. The film can easily be broken down into two categories, one being Natalie Portman and the other being Everything Else.
As a whole it is a sadly embarrassing film that seems to somehow justify the angst that is common to most everyone's teenage years, years that most also grow out of. Were I given the ability to write, direct, and star in a film at the age of fourteen, it probably would have turned out quite the carbon copy of Garden State.
Ian Holm is forced into a role that is so shallow and static that it could have been performed by any older male with ability to frown. Of course, the older male would have not even needed to frown if he simply wore a sandwich board sign declaring "I'm the dad. I'm emotionally distant. I'm the bad buy."
Braff, being a bit older than fourteen, realizes he has to contrive a need to justify this angst. Improper medicating. This would have been acceptable if the film made it out to be more than a shoe-horned plot device. However, it resurfaces seemingly at random, and the emphasis isn't on WHY someone would do this to their son, but that fact that the son can now LEGITIMATELY be angst-ridden.
Which sets the stage for the rest of the movie's downfalls. Scenes seem to be forced along, painfully at times, to simply deliver lines of dialogue so awkward that the desire to look away and blush is almost overwhelming. The rhyme and reason of the film is simply "That happened so that this could happen." It is not the fulfilling flow "This happened BECAUSE of these stimuli." Poor writing.
The saving grace? Natalie Portman. She's winning and likable, quirky but not alienatingly so. You WANT to love her, which judging by the rest of the characters, is directly her fault and not that of the writer/director.
With the trite teen comedy/romance ending, this film rapes any further indie dignity it seems to carry, but if you were a discerning viewer it came as no surprise. Yet sadly, it's hailed as genius, and delightfully outside the mainstreem.
It's a sad state of affairs when this could somehow, at this moment, be in the top 250 movies of all time.
There are better movies out that are pretty easy to get at your rental place. If you're looking for legitimate characters that are engaging yet quirky, proceed directly to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If you're looking for an engaging romance/comedy flick, go straight to Lost in Translation.
But please, don't stop in Garden State.