Film on Existentialism

Rating: 9/10 (3 January 2005)

I'm not suggesting that it is a film not to be missed, but 'Garden State' is a quite unusually intelligent Hollywood film. It appears to be a modern re-write of Camus' "L'Etranger" (The Stranger/The Outsider) without the murder, but with a brief nod to the African element.
The photography is pretty good with some amusingly ironic shots - nothing too subtle, of course, but not simply slapstick. The script isn't bad and seeing a Yank film tackle the subject of existentialism so sympathetically is rather encouraging - not everybody there is a mad axe-wielding fundamentalist, we know theoretically, but it is nice to have practical reassurance.
If you've nothing better to do, or want to rent a reasonable film for the evening, I can recommend it. The sentimentality is a little excessive, but, for Hollywood, it is remarkably restrained and even, at times, almost tasteful emotion. As you'd expect, it does hammer the point home rather more than is necessary, but not to the extent that it becomes irritating.
-- Spoilers follow I realise that I ought to give more detail of how the film explored existentialism - those who haven't seen the film might wish to stop reading here.

The opening scene with the stark Spartan minimalist bedroom makes a point of the protagonist's alienation from the world. He is a cipher, a zombie, a person with no aims. His being on lithium is a metaphor for being distanced from life - stripped of affect.

His reaction to the message of his mother's death is intentionally lacking in affect. As with Meursault, he is an outsider, a stranger to the world, who sees it drained of colour (hence the white bleached room).

His reactions to his old friends are as to strangers. His friends live in a state of alienation from each other and the world 'living' lives of profound emptiness - they dispute with each other who has the more meaningless life and all end depressed, realising that they all have.

The rich friend who has his money from a fatuously useless invention tries energetically to find some meaning for his life and fails completely.

His father, the psychiatrist, sees the only resolution in suppressing all meaning and feeling making his son as numb to life as he is - this part is particularly well acted, I felt, with the robotic shell of a man, clever, able, but lacking any purpose other than a vague feeling of duty brilliantly portrayed.

The gravedigger and grave robber, his old friend, robs his mother of her jewellery without any moral compunction - he is amoral as a result of his emptiness. He passes it on to the fence without any concern at all.

He interacts with the girl in a superficial manner. She falls in love with him, but he sees simply short term carnal pleasure - which is why he is at first prepared to simply go back to his empty 'life' and continue as before.

The redemption occurs when his grave robber friend sees his lack of affect, realises that something is wrong and goes, with him, in the quest into the void to recover meaning - the trinket with balls that he stole from the corpse.

The protagonist starts to realise that his life needs changing when his mother dies - in a theoretical way. So he stops the lithium - that is he makes himself more open to experience and understanding. Some of the affection the girl has for him seeps through. He feels some connection with the trinket and can think again about the circumstances of his mother's death and crippling. He realises that his life has been affected profoundly by the trivial matter of a plastic fastening being poorly manufactured - no great meaning has led to his emptiness, only triviality. This emphasises the lack of meaning in life.

When he gets back on the aeroplane to return to his old life, the horror of the emptiness starts to get to him and he realises that he has to manufacture his own meaning - starting with the girl. This gestalt moment is the coming together of the threads in the film, and still lacks effect. Though he has understood the need for meaning we see, as the film ends, that he has a lot more work to do to make this meaning work for him.

The grave robber is the equivalent of the prosecutor in Camus' novel. Most of the rest is the same. The literal use of a void to depict a void - and a number of the other literal images and metaphors are what you'd expect from a Yank film, but they are still pretty effective.