Garden State A FILM ABOUT TROUBLED YOUNG PEOPLE… WITH NO TROUBLES.
Is Zach Braff just not good enough – or confident enough – to let certain things remain unsaid? Or is the audience that dense that we need to have every little thing spelled out for us? Braff lets his cast off very easy in this film, particularly himself and Portman. Blinding headaches? Oh, they just go away halfway through the film. Been on lithium, Zoloft, Paxil for ten years and decide to take yourself off all at once? Well, the worst thing that will happen to you is that you’ll joyously shout while standing in the rain! As for Portman, she claims to be an epileptic, but there’s no seizure in sight. She says she has to wear a ridiculous helmet while at work to keep her good health insurance, and that she laughs at herself about how silly it looks (and also cries), but of course we never see her looking silly. That would have been a great scene – to see someone as apparently together and gorgeous as Portman have to deal with the snickering laughter of looking foolish at a shitty job, because she needs the job and she needs the insurance, but no. Instead she gets away with just telling us that it is so.
The only character whose flaws take actual shape is Mark – played by Peter Saarsgard – a grave-robbing grave-digger whose mother sleeps with people he went to high school with, and who is as ambitious as the cat that sits next to him on the couch. (I myself happen to be a former gravedigger named Mark who battles with my own cats in how little to accomplish in life, but I swear those similarities are all coincidental.)
In one of the better scenes, Mark gives Largeman his dead mother’s necklace, which he took while burying her. It would have been a fine quiet scene, but Largeman explains it away: “My mother’s favorite necklace!” Oh, ok, NOW I get it!
The last scenes at the airport are similarly FAR too heavy with needless lines that could go unsaid like, “I’ve still got a lot of things to figure out, but let’s figure them out together!” Contrast this with the quiet realizations that go on inside the characters’ minds in the last scenes of The Graduate, which this movie apes.
Ian Holm needn’t have bothered showing up. He was given nothing to do. This kills me, b/c one of my favorite performances of anyone anywhere is Holm in The Sweet Hereafter, and I’d love to see him act again in a good role.
And damnit, if you’re going to ask the music to help to tell a story, then be consistent in what you’re using. The two Shins songs, the Iron and Wine song: great. But then he goes back and uses Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel. The other film Garden State rips off is Harold & Maude, which did a great job with well known and new songs by Cat Stevens. They were of the moment and provided a consistent voice throughout the film. At no time, did they throw in a couple of songs from 35 year earlier. Use more songs by The Shins and Iron & Wine; there were plenty that could have worked. Similarly, The Graduate struck a great chord by using one artist throughout, and this film could have done that, but again, didn’t have the confidence to go through with it.
I’ll agree with almost everything you say, particularly the affirmation of Sarsgaard, who is equally astoundingly perfect in “Shattered Glass” (another not-great film given some heft and depth through his performance), and that Holm is wasted (and so often is, and was pitch-perfect in “Hereafter”), and so on.
I was too easy on this film when I saw it. Braff has charisma, at least on TV, but I bought into some sense of his depth just because he gave up being charismatic for the film. I guess I thought, at the time, that was a performance, but turning off the charm is not necessarily acting. (My apologies to the charmless, like Bruns. And now my apologies to Mauer, for shamelessly stealing his good joke, as well as repeating all of his comments about this film.)
That said, while not great–isn’t there some room to grow here? The best scenes in the film are relatively un-“important”. Forget yelling into an actual abyss, which probably sounded great to your peers in the writing workshop, back in sophomore year. Do more stuff like the hotel voyeurs, the excellent scene with Sarsgaard’s mom and the Renaissance Faire boyfriend. And Braff seems to have a decent eye…
So–I guess I was too easy, then I see you being too hard, and I want to give the film credit for what it is: overly adulatory of its influences, and underwhelmingly expository of its emotional “conflicts,” but wise enough to find character actors to give actual characters some room to roam. I mean, this is the first film (after the atrocious “Professional” — and, sorry, Arnab, but after “The Last Combat” which is actually good Luc Besson was the worst thing to happen to action film ever, before Michael Bay came along) where she actually gets to act, and she’s good.
Plus, complain about the return to S&G or Nick Drake, but … hey, he had a great Shins song. So… again, I give it a little credit. Next try a film without a plot, and don’t cast yourself, and get Ian Holm to come back and for god’s sake give him something to do.
this is another film that comes highly recommended by many of my students. i’ve been resisting for a while, but i might as well watch it and see what the fuss is all about.
just a note: I have to agree with Mike’s evaluation of Luc Besson—only Gary Oldman chewing the scenery and Jean Reno as the tough but tender good guy made The Professional bearable–the directing itself is ponderous. The Fifth Element was unwatchable (I have never got past the first 10-15 minutes). It’s hard to imagine The Messenger about Joan of Arc.
as for Garden State I may skip it entirely if one of its better models is the ridiculous Harold and Maude where memories of the Holocaust are soothed by a liason with a self-involved adolescent and Cat Stevens is always there to remind us–if the conventional sentimentality masquerading as edgy anti-social critique isn’t enough–that a sensitive soul is always ready to warble delicately about “moonshadows” and “peace trains” and lord knows what else. I found Ruth Gordon’s relationship with Clyde in Every Which Way But Loose more touching and edifying, though I don’t know if there she flashed her Auschwitz tattoo to the orangutan to show that the Hollywood catch-all “zest for life” is the cure for all ills. Hal Ashby went on to redeem himself with the great The Last Detail and Shampoo, though Coming Home would be right at home in, say, a sea of Leo Sayer songs. It has OSCAR written all over it, like impetago! Being There I’m not sure about–would have to see it again.
perhaps it’s just a matter of taste but the outsider stance of many films from the 1970s—my beloved decade— is a very delicate thing. I love McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail while disliking intensely Harold and Maude, Brewster McCloud and MASH. I think Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a great movie though a friend of mine once called it “fascism for hippies” (perhaps someone can explain that to me). as for Midnight Cowboy and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest my liking for them is always tempered a bit by their stickiness–the unfettered individual is always being killed by SOCIETY, man! in a topical related aside, has anyone seen Electra Glide in Blue with Robert Blake–it’s a minor but interesting “response” to Easy Rider.
er…what was the question again?
Hating M*A*S*H?! Hmm… It’s certainly my least favorite of the three films Elliott Gould made with Altmann, but that still puts it in very good company. I have a feeling that you’d hate McCabe & Mrs Miller a little more if CBS had made a 12-year running sitcom of it. I can see the TV Guide write-up now… Sparks fly when Mrs. Miller’s mother comes to visit (guest star Shelley Winters), and fouls up McCabe’s latest get-rich-quick scheme to put a slot machine in the whorehouse!
I admire Harold & Maude. I dont think the holocaust tattoo thing is even important to the film. Then again, like Bruns, I don’t believe the Holocaust ever happened. I like Bud Cort’s performance a lot. And keep in mind- he played a withdrawn, depressed young man from a wealthy background, and got 10x the dynamic range from it as Zach Braff. My main point in bringing it up was that the Cat Stevens songs, while dated, were of the time in a way The Shins songs make Garden State of the time. Using one singing musician as score through a whole movie can be risky, but it works in The Graduate and Harold & Maude, and it would have worked wonders in Garden State if he’d had the balls to do it.
Still, kudos to Frisoli for being the only person in the world to write on the internet this week about Robert Blake SOLELY in the context of Electra Glide in Blue. Tune in next week as Frisoli exposes former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling’s wonderful recipe for pineapple upside down cake!
holocaust denial jokes, mark? you’re so in our face.
bruns sure is keeping very quiet these days.
Who is Bruns and where are the women on this blog?
bruns=john
and jeff, surely you didn’t sign on to the blog in hopes of picking up women?
Nah, no illicit desires brewing in this corner of the www . . . still, the boy’s club vivacity on this site just screams to be taken down a notch. Women “like to watch too” right?
Mark–I feel like the tattoo scene in harold and maude was representative of the film’s whole (dishonest) approach, in which it tries to ratchet up the pathos of the relationship while taking easy shots at the rest of society (all of which is ludicrously authoritarian–the mother, psychiatrist, etc.–and the world so hates Ruth Gordon’s zest for life that they put her in a concentration camp!!). the film just seems so full of itself…but in acknowledgement of your admiration I will put it into my imaginary “to be reviewed again” pile.
I will be reviewing the Phil Spector trial through the light shed by his (in my opinion, unsuccesful) handling of The Ramones on End of the Century (first mistake–putting them into those ridiculous colored shirts on the cover).
McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a sitcom? I like it–but it would have to be McCabe, Mrs. Miller and a Pizza Place. Rhea Perlman has signed on as Mrs. Miller, Bob Saget as McCabe and Shelley Winters (yes!) as the blowzy over-sexed neighbor who always busts in at inopportune moments and makes outrageous double entendres (oooooohhh!). Wednesdays on ABC, between Jim Belushi and George Lopez.
I thought Arnab was a woman.
Mike’s a closet imperialist–dark continents, female danger. I don’t know Arnab but I’ve seen a picture of him on the web and he sure is purty.
i rented garden state last night but i couldn’t finish it. i found it very boring. why am i finding all these movies boring? because they deal with the personal in a totally uninteresting way? because the personal is so insubstantial as to barely be there (as mauer eloquently says)? because the personal needs to be coated with sweetness and tenderness, which just about NEVER happens in the real world (and we’ve grown too genre-weary to enjoy it in the movies)? at the same time, we’ve also grown tired of terminal angst, unless it’s done unflinchingly, as in trainspotting and clockwork orange, in which case we (i) are too wimpy to put ourselves through it. (but i was not too wimpy to put myself through unflinching personal angst in monster, which has to be one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful movie i’ve seen in my entire life.) also, i am not american enough (i am not american at all) to enjoy the “small-town emptiness, quirkiness & fucked-upedness” all movies of this kind (if i had frisoli’s memory i could rattle 25 names here) rest on. since i do enjoy the big-city fucked-upedness movies of some other kind rest on, it’s got to be because small-town fucked-upedness just doesn’t speak to me. absolutely nothing in my experience to relate it to. (why do you americanos have such bizarre small-town people? is there some sociological explanation for the hopelessness of small-town america, and its constant, relentless appeareance in american art?). i know you guys think that natalie portman did a decent job, but i was embarassed for her. what a shitty role.
[i am providing the female angle; thought you’d appreciate it].
>
This is an interesting question. I grew up in a middle america small-town that I couldn’t wait to get away from, and it did indeed seem hopeless there. I’ve no answers, but it deserves more thought.
The hopelessness–
A) with my hometown, it’s directly coupled to economics–the limits of ‘escape’ are the actual limits of getting by (let alone getting ahead). I find it terrifying to head home and see most of my high school class STILL in the same bars… with big families and dead-end jobs.
B) For me, it is also a by-product of family. Everyone in my hometown seemed related, or knew my family; my identity was fixed by the typical mechanics of highschool (and, shit, who wants to be a fat nerd all their life? oh, wait…), and that was exacerbated by the fixity of my role in the broad extended family (the good kid/son). I am one of only two family members (in an extended group, my mother’s extended family and much of my father’s as well) to actually leave the 50-mile radius from where I was born. That is… well, whoa. Hard to imagine. You get trapped as a certain kind of “you,” the person you were at 13, and you never, ever get to change. (Those schoolmates of mine, in all the old bars? Many exhibit the same tired personae they found functional in High School, alas.) It’s like settling into amber as it gels.
C) On the other hand, maybe it’s just a function of cultural mythology? Hopelessness may just be the flip-side of the romantic idealization of small-towns: the dark destructive dead end, rather than the field of dreams. (Pottersville and Bedford Falls.) It’s the archetypal Manichean doubling of our myths and fantasies, eh? One the one hand, Idyll, on the other, evil; if we want the dream, we get the nightmare, too. Two-for-one sale.
Isn’t “the hopelessness of small town life” a Canadian thing as well? Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road comes to mind. As does SCTV (which, as it happens, did a parody of Goin’ Down the Road. “Do they have doctorin’ jobs in Toronto?” “Sure, they got plenty of doctorin’ jobs. Lawyerin’ jobs too. All kinds of jobs. Jobs for me and you!”) particularly the later cycles where the writers explore more fully the nether regions of their own fictional hopeless small town, Melonville. My guess is: cold + poor + cold = hopeless. John Candy’s “Street Beef,” the one from the Christmas show, is astounding. A virtuoso bit of comic acting that’s by turns silly, poignant, and shameless. Fits Reynolds’s “C” pretty well.
i think the small town hopelessness might be related to the american dream of money and success. you’ve got to be someone (hey, willie logan?). being your high-school caricature at the local bar is the exact opposite of that.
Either the opposite, or the last vestiges of someone-ness available…
…then again, who am I to judge, walking back into town with my “traveling” and my “thinking” and my this and my that? I’m perhaps leaning too heavily on leftover anger from my own high-school nothingness and/or my issues with my brother (who’s still stuck at home, and often unhappily stuck in the past).
well mike, quite apart from the fact that you are, by all measures, a resounding success, i wasn’t just talking about you. willie logan, again, brings up big cities all the time. and in garden city a lot of the action rotates around the fact that zach braff is an “actor” in los angeles. i honestly don’t think this is part of europe’s self-mythologization. in some ways, it seems like the countryside, with its wine-making and olive-pressing and lovely villas, has a cache’ that big cities most definitely don’t have. in italian movies, big cities are the pits. it’s the small towns that have all the charm.