The third and final indie film I saw in the summer of 2004 (mere days before I left for my freshman year of college) was Zach Braff's Garden State, which was actually my first exposure to the actor/writer/director. For whatever reason, I found this movie to be much funnier than it actually is the first time I saw it. The movie definitely has funny moments, but I now see it as a film about loneliness with brief moments of humor throughout.
Andrew "Large" Largeman is living the dream in the eyes of all of his friends in New Jersey. He left the Garden State nine years before the film started to become a famous movie actor. The reality is that he's just another person out in Hollywood; he's gotten a few bit parts here and there, but has not made it big yet. To get by, he works as a waiter in a trendy Vietnamese restaurant (even though he's, obviously, not Vietnamese), where he serves "hip" drinks (I hate Red Bull, by the way) to "hip" people who treat him like a slave. He gets called back to Jersey when his mother dies, and the movie follows him as he reconnects with the friends and family that he left behind.
But he also reconnects with himself. The very first thing we see in the film is Large's dream sequence in which he is on a crashing plane, but while all the other passengers scream in horror, Large is strangely calm. This disconnected feeling extends to his waking life; he moves through life hopped up on lithium and other mood stabilizers, barely perceiving the world around him. He doesn't feel anything and barely reacts to the world around him. From the very few scenes we see in Los Angeles, we are led to believe that he has few acquaintances, ambition, or money (his empty white apartment says a great deal). When he gets back to Jersey, he barely has any reaction to anything at his mother's funeral, and when he goes to a party with some of his friends from high school, he is still in a state of detachment, despite using various mind-altering (illicit) drugs.
Two things change while he is in New Jersey: he decides that the time has come to stop taking his prescription drugs, and he meets Sam, a woman who is in every way his opposite. Sam tries to fully experience the world and will do anything that crosses her mind, regardless of how silly or potentially embarrassing it is. She and her mom have a great relationship, but she still lives at home (whereas Large has moved out, but can barely talk to his father, who is the reason he has been on lithium his entire life). The one trait they do share is loneliness; although Sam is outgoing on the surface, she is a very strange girl who has a problem with the truth (in that she can't tell it) and doesn't seem to be able to connect with most people on a long-term basis.
Sam helps Large to readjust back into life, easing the transition from sleepwalking to actual feeling, while Large takes her out of her bubble and introduces her to a darker side of life (although the film doesn't explicitly say this, Sam seems to have never ventured outside the safe, "everything-will-always-be-ok" world that kids are often told exists). It culminates with her showing him that some things are worth fully living for, while he ends by breaking her heart (only to quickly return and make everything better). A lot of people complain about the Hollywood ending that feels tacked on because of the preceding tone of the film. I too find the ending a bit jarring, but on the other hand, I can kind of see the ending as what Braff intended based on the above interpretation (he learned that there is more to life than himself and learned to appreciate that outside of himself).
Up next: SCDP...
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