Review by © Jane Freebury
Every once in a while a feature comes along that signals a fresh, new creative voice that makes filmmaking look effortlessly fluent and inventive. Writer/director Zach Braff has achieved this with his first feature.
In his personal tale about homecoming and falling in love it’s clear the inhabitants of New Jersey have become gentle caricatures for New Yorkers, in the way that ‘Taswegians’ or ‘banana benders’ have for smug south-eastern metropolitans. Add to this the fact that the central character ‘Large’ is heavily medicated and pretty much out of it as well, and you’ll get the idea, but Garden State has a heart.
New Jersey boy Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) is summoned home when his mother dies. He has lived about as far away as he can get in the ten years since he last saw his parents, but he decides to fly out of LA for a while to attend his mother’s funeral. It’s not exactly a wrench, leaving behind a television role as a retarded quarterback and a job as a waiter in a restaurant.
He arrives home to find that old friends have become gravediggers or graverobbers, policemen and one has even become a millionaire, living in a mansion he can’t be bothered furnishing. Large’s visit home is an utterly picaresque trip through bizarre encounters that when annotated can give the impression this movie is straining for effect. But the scenes at the family funeral, the reunions with friends, the visit to the neurologist and many more all work, are funny, inventive and told with visual flair.
Stranger than strange is Andrew’s relationship with his father, the psychiatrist who has had him medicated since he was nine years old. Played to a tee by gnomic Englishman Ian Holm – who bears an uncanny resemblance to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins – it’s plain to see father and son have never hit it off.
The tone of Garden State is spot on. It could so easily have slipped into an objectionable and self-satisfied parody of the wierdos in Newark, but this never happens. This has a lot to do with the character of Large himself, who is often the butt of jokes, and the really sweet performance from Natalie Portman as the girl he falls for.
4 stars