About.com Rating



Rick Moody fans should be warned that "Garden State," written, directed, and starring twenty-nine year old Zach Braff is not based on the first novel of the contemporary author. The book and the film share the title, the same setting (the infamous American armpit of the Eastern seaboard otherwise known as New Jersey) and a preponderance of sad characters.

Zach Braff Finds Himself In New Jersey

The movie certainly feels as if it could have a book behind it; the characters, from the main players to the random hardware clerks, are idiosyncratic and engaging.

Wild details come at you fast and loose, including green, forest-patterned shirts to match the wall paper, a backyard grave yard crammed full with dead pets, a figure skating alligator, and an incomplete set of Desert Storm trading cards.

Braff plays the film's hero Andrew Largeman, an actor moderately famous for his portrayal of a retarded quarterback, who returns home for the first time in eight years after the sudden death of his paraplegic mother. (And look how many more, quirky details filled that last sentence.) Large, as his friends call him, has a sad history, involving a tragic incident revolving around a broken dishwasher latch; his father (Ian Holm) is also his psychiatrist, and keeps his son heavily medicated to keep him from feeling pain. Before the film's end, Large, of course, has got to feel the pain, embrace it, and begin to move past it, and in the process, he gets to go a spiritual journey through the bowels of New Jersey. For the audience, it's a fun ride.

Large's primary companions on this journey are his old buddy Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a perpetually stoned grave digger, and Sam (Natalie Portman), the young woman he meets in a doctor's waiting room.

A compulsive liar, epileptic, and non-stop chatterbox, Sam is hands down the most appealing character in the film, and Portman, in a terrific performance, runs away with the movie.

Unfortunately, the serious conversations at the film's end are not able to sustain the high quality that carried the film along. When finally confronting the serious issues he skillfully set up, Braff is brought back to earth, with familiar clichés such as Sam's final wisdom: "Life is hard."