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How to describe 'Garden State? One word: plastic
Natalie Portman and Zach Braff
Fox Searchlight
Director: Zach Braff
Stars: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Ian Holm
MPAA rating: R for language, drug use and a scene of sexuality
Now playing: Squirrel Hill Theater
Unmistakably influenced by "The Graduate" (1967), right down to the inclusion of a Simon and Garfunkel song ("The Only Living Boy in New York"), "Garden State" concerns a young Jewish man at a moment of geographic and emotional transition.
When his psychiatrist-father Gideon (Ian Holm) phones from New Jersey to say that Andrew's mom has died in a bathtub, 26-year-old Andrew Largemen (Zach Braff) lies in his sparsely decorated Los Angeles bedroom listening to the message being recorded.
Gideon always blamed Andrew, who was 9 at the time, for the accident that left the mother a paraplegic. Out of paternal aggression, Gideon launched the son's reliance on prescription drugs.
Andrew heads home for the first time in nine years, having starred in a cable TV movie as "a retarded quarterback" and having waited tables in a manner south of substandard.
He postpones confronting his dad, who still manages to slap on a fresh coat of guilt deftly, telling the son he won't be well until he forgives himself for what he did to his mother.
Given that the father is more interesting than all other characters combined, especially as acted with Holm's razor precision, "Garden State's" neglect of him betrays the film's misplaced focus.
It insists on being about Andrew, who wiles most of four days hanging out with two former school friends, the stoner-gravedigger Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) and Albert (Denis O'Hare), who has invented silent Velcro, the film's drollest joke.
And falling in love (Don't they always?) with the motormouth Sam (Natalie Portman), whose description as a liar and an epileptic are, in the end, irrelevant.
Just as Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in "The Graduate" had to reject plastics, the symbol of '60s surface values, Andrew must chuck the wonder drugs that have anesthetized him for 17 years and rendered him apathetic.
"The Graduate" began by depicting Benjamin's hilarious gasp for air in his parents' intensely achievement-driven world, then observing him elbow lose in the one way he wasn't free to.
"Garden State" self-consciously smacks of hip in ways that don't resonate with Andrew's quest for freedom. It looks for profundity in random, quirky episodes and eccentric behavior.
But Andrew's epiphany is that of a young filmmaker patching spare parts that already feel exhausted -- the pot-smoking mom, the forced flakiness, the 20-somethings preciously sharing a group yell in the rain.
Real, unforgettable angst spilled through into a similar scene in "Cabaret." The same moment in "Garden State," without the earned anxiety, can't help feeling ... plastic.
