Flak Magazine: Review of Garden State, 09.20.04

Our twentysomething leading man flies cross-country to return after years of absence to his hometown. He starts out numb, slow and stumbling. While at a homecoming party, he is hailed for relatively minor accomplishments and buffeted with absurd business and life advice. The young man wants only to retreat into himself. An unexpected romance with an unconventional girl helps our hero overcome his defining tragedy: a shameful incident with an older woman. Increasingly, he feels, wants, hurts and loves deeply. While the film ends with boy catching girl, it also ends with the couple unsure of their next move. Along the way, we're treated to hotel sex, primal screams, church services, Simon and Garfunkel, lecherous older women sleeping with their children's friends and the poolside mania of the idle rich.

The fact that the above synopsis applies equally well to 2004's Garden State and 1967's The Graduate forces us to ask just what relationship exists between the films. Is writer/director/star Zach Braff's new indie darling a remake of, riff on or rebuke to Mike Nichols' canonical tale of youth rebellion? The films are too similar to invoke coincidence, synchronicity or mere "inspiration." Garden State asks us to rethink the social implications and sufficiency of one of the most important American films.

The Graduate finds Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) returning to Los Angeles upon finishing college "back east." True to form, LA provides nothing but summertime transplendence for Benjamin — dazzling sunshine, baby blue water in the pool, rich green lawns, a blinding glare off every outside surface. By contrast, Garden State's Andrew "Large" Largeman (Braff) leaves LA to attend his mother's funeral, doped to the gills with anti-depressants. The New Jersey to which he returns is painted from the palette of autumn: Dead leaves litter the ground and the sun rarely comes out. We see dirt as much as grass. It's Braff's way of saying that as our society has developed, we've entered the next, cooler, slower season from that captured in The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson wasn't so much a sex goddess as the red-hot embodiment of her society's demands to conform. She ordered Benjamin around, and he needed it, because the development of his life had never been self-directed; he had always grown towards the sunlight of parental approval. In Garden State, there is no Mrs. Robinson for Large because her character has been made laughable in the interim. In fact, Braff has provided a comic doppelganger for Mrs. Robinson: Large's friend's mother, Carol (Jean Smart). She lusts after a kid her son's age, a Klingon-speaking fast-food knight paramour; she tries to rope Large and Mark into a real estate pyramid scheme; she turns off the carbon monoxide detector because it beeps all the time; she does hits off her son's bong. Mrs. Robinson 2004 is a sad sack.

In the 37 years since The Graduate debuted, belief in the enabling power and probity of the previous generation has wilted. Even Large's father doesn't believe that he knows what's best for his son in any specific way — he writes sheaves of prescriptions and hopes for the best. Braff suggests the father, and his father's generation, gave up on parenting in any meaningful way, and the cynicism of films like The Graduate had to have played a part.

Almost without exception, everything in Garden State is slower, seedier and sadder than its Graduate counterpart. Benjamin had a fire-red Alfa Romeo in which he flew down the highways chasing after Elaine, but Large gets a military-issue kelly green motorcycle with sidecar, in which he travels at sub-Vespa speeds. The interiors of The Graduate were impeccably clean and well-lit, glassy, often emphasizing black and white. Contrast the tony Hotel Taft of that movie to Natalie Portman's bedroom in Garden State, a mustard-colored jumble of '70s fashion gone stale from neglect, her house inflected with a Christmas tree that never comes down. The world has worn out. The only time that Garden State outpaces The Graduate is where modern pharmaceuticals come into play — we've given up on the intractable problems of meaning, but at least we can distract ourselves by speeding up, slowing down and cutting up time. The long, long shots of The Graduate are here interrupted by bursts of triple-time diversion.

Except Large hasn't given up on meaning. He finds it (and here the overeager script could have left a couple of dots for the audience to connect themselves) in the idea of family ("a group of people who all miss the same imaginary place"), the ideal of forgiveness (reconnecting with his father, absolving years of benign neglect) and the needfulness of love in the moment (when, as a little kid, his mom offered him a sleeve on which to wipe his snotty nose). At Garden State's climax, Large stares into the apparently infinite abyss over which New Jersey authorities want to build a mall and finds it to be the same shape as the hole in him. The pills that the father prescribes are designed to be mental fixatives, keeping Large safe by isolating him from the crush of his emotions. By choosing to stop the medication, Large willingly opens himself up to a more direct (sometimes brutally so) experience of the world. In The Graduate's climactic church scene, all of the shouts and yells of the wedding party are replaced with silent faces, mouthing obscenities. That film envisioned zoning out as progress, and Benjamin and Elaine see each other mainly in negative terms: not like their parents, not the conventional choice, not permitted. Garden State's climax isn't when he comes back for the girl, but when he sits his father down for a heart-to-heart. They commune. Large really works to understand and forgive his father, and the father really works to find a place for himself in Large's life. Rendering yourself vulnerable to the phenomenal world, to the swirls and eddies of interpersonal relationships — caring — is mostly a choice rather than a process. Large chooses to care.

— Martin Scribbs (bluerb@yahoo.com)