The Secret Garden…State
[Originally published Sept. 2004, WashPub Vol 1]
Garden State exhibits the acting, directing, and writing skills of Scrubs star Zach Braff. His movie has found both critical success and a steadily growing fan base of angst-ridden teenagers and their 20-something counterparts. How did a movie ostensibly designed to prove New Jersey is not just a series sprawling suburbs lying outside the service-station laden Turnpike find such generational comparisons to The Graduate?
The story of Garden State is the story of Andrew Largeman, played by Braff. Upon learning of his mother’s drowning death, Andrew finds himself returning to the home he left 7 years ago for Hollywood. In so doing he is confronted by his troubled paternal relationship, the current lifestyle of old high school friends, and an excitingly new romantic relationship. And he’s decided to go off his daunting regiment of psychiatric medication. What happens when someone with the combined prescriptions of Ken Kesey’s Randall Patrick McMurphy and Leland Stamper decides to take an unmediated voyage home? More than he ever thought possible.
As he travels home, he rediscovers the lives of many old friends, along with the many people that just know him as ‘the Robert DeNiro of New Jersey’ for playing a retarded football player on a weekend TV-movie. And he finds that the world of New Jersey is no less strange than plastic world of Hollywood.
He finds that his friends are everything from grave-diggers, to knights, to self-made millionaires- an excellent mix of people and funds to have great parties. And don’t forget the former crack user now spending his nights as a cop whose chief joy is to make every speeding driver feel as if the ATF is bashing down their door. As Andrew can tell instantly, he has missed a lot- not only in terms of his hometown, but he’s also missed in his life the growing pains that all his acquaintances have experienced. He’s a near-thirty year old who hasn’t gone through puberty. And this is eloquently shown (if not heavily) in his inability to swim like all the other kids at one of the many revelries he finds himself at during his visit home.
The movie touches on Largeman’s alienation most strikingly in one of the early scenes of the film. Andrew is welcomed home by a money and drug-infused party hosted by the over-successful and ever-decadent friend that invented silent Velcro. Sitting down on the couch, having entered the pill den, Andrew finds himself sitting within a drug-induced, erotic game of spin the bottle. As the song ‘Waiting in Line’ drops over the scene one can’t feel the swallow beauty posing to the eyes. Red and blue colors flicker across the screen flirtatiously.
We watch him take his portion of Ecstasy and coyly state “See you all latter.” Watching this one feels the frost of the emotional ice-box that has been revealed. While a Dionysian feast grinds and groans around him in lucid detail, we watch him sit. Andrew remains frozen and unmoved by any of the physical provocations. Even the dizzying straddles of over-aged high-school accomplish nothing more than superficial stimulation which only aggravates his feeling of desperation. He can barely take his hands to touch her - his eyes reddening throughout the scene. Holding his hands back, Andrew apprehensively expresses the common sinister truth that binds both his medical lithium and the musty smelling synthetic drugs: both hold a retreat from reality in favor of the black, sinister smile of corrupted happiness. The flashes of fever-red pleasure they bring only seem to leave Andrew a cold-blue core. Drugs are pure the embodiment of alienation. And this is being a town where all have their drug of choice, alienation abounds.
And so we watch as the women come and go, speaking of their Michelangelo. And of course, Andrew will have to find his own.
So happiness trots on-screen through Samantha (Natalie Portman). There is no hiding the complimentary nature of this obvious love-interest. She is dynamic and loud where Andrew is contemplative and redrawn. She openly weeps and celebrates the tides of life, whereas Andrew cocoons himself in numbness. Naturally, they meet within a medical waiting room: each awaiting a diagnosis of their ‘head’ problems. And instantly we know that Andrew will be learning a ‘new slang’ of life- in another the more overly purposeful scenes. But first, of course, he must persuade the ever precocious Sam that while he did play a retarded football player on TV, he is in fact, not actually retarded. After a long discussion, Sam (tentatively) accepts this as the truth.
And so Andrew takes Sam home, and enters a new and different world than any he has ever experienced. Sam’s loud lifestyle abounds and strives in the mess that makes existence. Rottweilers clasp and grind everything from Andrew’s legs to television remotes. And yes, there is even a dusting for animal paw prints to find out what pesky creature can’t stop from peeing on the X-Box controller. Hamsters run throughout the house, all held in brightly colored plastic cages that stretch from the living room throughout the house. There is even an African college student that wanted to continue living within a ‘tribe’, so he moved in. The house breathes familial intimacy, adoration, love, protection, and disappointment- all flowing free. All successes and failures are shared.
And thus we learn of Sam’s dashed ice-skating dreams owing to her debilitating condition of epilepsy- not in a whispered corner, but in the loud, adoring voice of her mother. When Andrew feels this, he can’t help but just take a deep long hug from Sam’s mother and wonder how this feels like home more than his own ever had. And it is only natural that the ice-skating alligator finds in Andrew a new medium to skate and bring out both their natural beauties. But, will she be allowed to?
Whereas Andrew suffers from an emotionally bogged down mind, Sam suffers from a physically constrained mind. As they drink at neighborhood bar and she tells him her story of mind troubles and truth issues, one hears the hauntingly beautiful ‘Blue Eyes’ rise from the scene. It’s not merely Sam expressing to (blue-eyed) Andrew her devotion, but also this: There is time for you and time for me and time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea, but don’t spend all of life’s time waiting for the moment to act.
As she states in one of the most overly faux profound moments of the film: “Don’t you see this is your chance to be completely original. To do something that no has or will ever do again.” Samantha is there to pull Andrew out of his indecisive behavior now that he has thrown off the pills. As they sit sipping their beers, and discussing the pains of their existence the music conveys the true beauty of imperfect existence. She sings her virtuous siren melody, showing Andrew the cold-blue experiences he fears so much are the stuff of existence, and the pain they hold simultaneously express the pleasures of life.
And so Sam follows Andrew on his quest to explore the ‘infinite abyss’ of both New Jersey and Andrew’s self- readying him for the evitable colloquy with his father. Andrew’s father seems almost as an apparition within the film, appearing and vanishing with sudden surprise. Yet, as much as Andrew wishes to blame him for all the psychic damage he has incurred, it is the father that demands the confrontation. Much like the ‘you and I’ between Andrew and Sam, it seems for Andrew to always be the ‘you’ (whether in the form of savior or apparent oppressor) that demands his accounts to be settled. It is this waiting for accounts and self-action that keeps the film’s firm grasp on both our sorrow and hope- with laughter abounding throughout. Andrew has felt new worlds: painful, loving, beautiful. Our hope is that Andrew will learn to swim the chambers of the sea of his life and unite these numerous worlds into one, and our sorrow results from the fear he might drown in cacophony of the new worlds he has just awakened within.
Zach Braff cues on two sources that reflect the thematic of his film: the song Waiting For My Real Life to Begin by Colin Hay and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. So, listen, read and watch all three of these delightful entries. While these works are not comparable in merit, the song and movie both give 21st Century articulations to truths that are both moving and enriching.
