Small movie with a very nice story and interesting dialog.

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2005)

Zach Braff as Andrew Largeman wrote, directed, and starred in "Garden State", a reference to New Jersey where most of it takes place. In a comment he makes in the very interesting 'making of' special on the DVD, about 80% of what is in the movie comes directly from things that have really happened, although not necessarily to him and his family. The filming had a budget of $2.5Million, which is very small for a feature length movie with real film and Dolby 5.1 sound. That it has already taken in almost $30Million before DVD sales is quite an accomplishment. This is a fine story of a young man and a young woman helping each other to find themselves.
SPOILERS are contained in the rest of my comments. Largeman is an actor and waiter in LA, had one role playing a retarded quarterback, has been under voluntary sedation for years on prescription medicine that his psychiatrist dad (Ian Holm) has prescribed for him, when he gets a message that his mom drowned in the bath tub. After a flight to New Jersey for the funeral, and having left his medicine in LA, he begins to meet all his former friends again, the most interesting Peter Sarsgaard as Mark, the grave digger who incidentally takes the jewelry off women corpses after the burial services to supplement his income. He spends most of his spare time doing some sort of recreational drugs.
Seeing his dad's doctor for one-second headaches he gets occasionally, Largeman meets Sam (Natalie Portman) who, it turns out, has had some epileptic seizures and has to wear a soft helmet to avoid being dropped from her employer's health insurance. She recognizes him for his 'retarded quarterback' role. "I can't believe you're not really retarded, you were so good." They go places in the motorcycle with sidecar that his grandfather had left him, but she won't ride in the sidecar. Largeman and Sam find they are soul mates, each has never found someone before that they connected with. Largeman explains that he has to fly back to LA and straighten some things back, Sam cries as he heads up the escalator, then a few minutes later he comes back and finds her in a phone booth, they embrace, he has decided staying there with Sam was more important.
Important character observation. Largeman's mom had become paralyzed when he was 9, he had an argument, pushed mom, who tripped over the open dishwasher door which had a broken latch. That episode was what caused his dad to prescribe drugs, and later sent off to school. He remarked that the one little piece of broken plastic is what caused all the misery in his life so far. The idea that sometimes some little random thing at a particular moment can have such a big impact on our lives. In fact, his script uses the word "random" in a number of situations.