Flashback Summer Vol. 2: Garden State

This song will change your life

Imagine…it’s 2004. The days are warm, but the nights are cool with the promise of fall. You just started college, and your heart is full of hope while your brain is full of facts about geography (well, not that many facts…you just failed your first test). For the first time in your life, you live within walking distance of a movie theater. And…sorry, what’s that noise? Why, it’s the swirling opening notes of Frou Frou’s “Let Go.” Imogen Heap is advising you to let go and jump in, like you’re Zach Braff at a pool party, and that can mean only one thing. It’s time to talk about Garden State.

I’m aware that it’s almost the end of August and I’m on only the second post of the series I called Flashback Summer. Well, it’s Flashback Late Summer and Fall now, because apparently I forgot that I don’t really have time to work in summer. Oh well! We’re here now. Let(‘s) go.

The first time I saw Garden State, I was a college freshman at Miami University. I saw it at the Princess, the uptown theater that later closed because of a fire (Oxford still doesn’t have a movie theater, which seems very bad for a college town but also kind of on brand, somehow). The second time I watched it was, yet again, at the Princess. I saw Garden State twice as soon as it came out because I loved this movie. That’s because Mr. Zach Braff wrote a movie seemingly designed for freshmen English majors who recently left their small town to attend a mid-size university.

The characters in this film are 26 (well, Zach Braff and Peter Sarsgaard are…Natalie Portman’s age is undetermined). I was eighteen, so they seemed impossibly mature and exciting. I didn’t see the film again until now, at 37. This was extremely disorienting. I wish I’d watched Garden State at some point in the intervening years so I could’ve avoided feeling this awareness of mortality. My own, Zach Braff’s, Natalie Portman’s hamster, etc.

Garden State is perhaps best described as a coming-of-age story, and Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred as Andrew Largeman. Andrew is an actor and waiter who returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. His mother died by drowning in the bathtub, but she was paralyzed years earlier because Andrew pushed her and she fell into the open door of the dishwasher. I totally forgot about this aspect of the film (death stuff didn’t really register with me when I was eighteen, presumably because I thought I was immortal), but now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve reminded my family several times that we have to be careful with the dishwasher because of Andrew Largeman’s mom.

Anyway, Andrew is heavily medicated (we see a nicely arranged shot of his entire medicine cabinet full of pill bottles as a Coldplay song plays) and unable to experience feelings. But when he comes back for the funeral, he goes off his medications. I don’t really know why, but maybe it was a space-saving thing. No way that entire medicine cabinet was gonna fit in a carry-on! At the funeral, he realizes that one of the grave diggers is his old high school buddy Peter Sarsgaard. Most of the performances in this movie are fine, some of them are good, and at least one of them is actually quite bad, but I couldn’t get over how perfect Peter Sarsgaard is in this role. His always half-closed eyes capture this character’s lack of motivation, and he always seems both disgusted and creepy.

While Andrew has been off becoming a slightly-recognizable star, his friends from home have been:

-becoming the aforementioned gravedigger (and also grave-robber)

-becoming rich by inventing silent Velcro

-becoming a very aggressive cop!

Andrew’s dad is played by Iam Holm. His mom is, as previously mentioned, dead. Andrew fills his short time at home by going to extremely stressful looking parties with his weird friends until he meets Natalie Portman in a doctor’s office waiting room. It looks like no waiting room I’ve ever seen, but maybe they do things differently in New Jersey! Maybe their waiting rooms look like the BMV.

If you know anything about this movie, you know about this scene. It’s where Natalie Portman, who starts talking to Andrew after a service dog humps his leg (what a poorly trained service dog!), puts her headphones on him and tells him that “New Slang” by The Shins will change his life.

Between this and (500) Days of Summer, there was a seeming epidemic of young men and women meeting because of headphones in the 2000s. It’s tempting write this off as an embarrassing male fantasy (you meet a cute girl and she likes the same music you do or she introduces you to new music!), but you know who else had this fantasy in the 2000s? Me! I spent a lot of time making mix CDs (yes this was the mix CD era) for all my friends and I had a radio show on our campus radio station and…I guess this fantasy did kind of play out for me, because I met my now-husband through the radio station! His radio show was right after mine on Friday nights. We’re starting to get to the heart of why I liked this movie so much.

But we need to pause for a moment to discuss the very tiny elephant in the room, which is Natalie Portman’s performance. I don’t use the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in any of my writing for all the reasons Nathan Rabin outlines in this piece, but it’s very difficult not to use it right now. While he may have initially come up with the phrase because of Elizabethtown, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was the original inspiration. Three years before Nathan Rabin coined the term, Roger Ebert described Natalie’s character as, “one of those creatures you sometimes find in the movies, a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you. Portman's success in creating this character is all the more impressive because we learn almost nothing about her, except that she's great to look at and has those positive attributes.” I miss him so much.

At eighteen, this didn’t bother me at all. As an aspiring Quirky Girl myself, I didn’t find any of her behavior all that odd. Remember, this was 2004…we were living through the Myspace era. Our hair was shaggy, our shirts were vintage, and things were random as hell. Was it really so bad that Natalie Portman’s house was covered in gerbil tunnels or that she was a compulsive liar? I mean, we’re not approaching “she ate ice cream with a fork” levels.

A photo of me in college

What I’d forgotten, or not noticed, about this character is that she has a very strong Jersey accent, which sounds just plain weird coming from Natalie Portman. She’s also…well, she’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl! There, you made me say it. Are you happy now? Seriously, who is this woman? How old is she? She looks like she’s about 18 but she’s gainfully employed. She lives with her family. She used to ice skate. And…yeah, that’s about it! Her performance is so over the top that it’s hard to watch, but I can’t really blame Natalie Portman. I could never blame Natalie Portman for anything! It’s not her fault that Jonathan Safran Foer left his wife for her. It’s not her fault that Moby was convinced they were in a relationship even though they weren’t. And it’s not her fault that this is a bizarre, distracting performance. Someone (Zach Braff) wrote those words for her and someone (Zach Braff) directed her performance.

Does it sound like I’m saying Zach Braff made a bad movie? Because, honestly, I don’t think that’s the case. Watching it now, as an adult, parts of it make me cringe. While there are many genuinely laugh out loud moments and natural performances and wonderful surprises (I forgot Jean Smart was in this! And Geoffrey Arend! And Jim Parsons!), the dialogue in the “emotional” scenes often feels very stiff. There’s a real forced poignancy here that’s hard to take at times.

There is, for example, this scene that takes place in the bottom of a quarry:

Andrew: Hey, Albert…

Albert: Yeah?

Andrew: Good luck exploring the infinite abyss.

Albert: Thank you. And hey…you too

It reminded me of that scene from They Came Together where Paul Rudd and Max Greenfield say, “Hey…thanks” to each other over and over.

But that’s 37-year-old me talking. Eighteen year old me was, as Natalie Portman would say, in it. When I first saw this movie, I was either newly infatuated or newly dumped by my first boyfriend (I’m tempted to get out my old journal to confirm the details, but I try to avoid looking at that thing unless I want to ruin my entire night). Reciprocated romantic feelings were very new for me, and I was high on life and Natalie Portman’s quirkiness. Literally every aspect of this movie was working for me. My boyfriend primarily listened to terrible metal, not The Shins, but I still found Garden State relatable. My life back then felt like it was exploding with possibility. I’d had such a hard time being myself or feeling loved in high school, and here I was, post jaw-breaking face surgery, in a new town with new people and a new life. I didn’t know how I’d become a writer yet, but now I was surrounded by books and people who loved them. It felt like my life was breaking open, like I was Andrew Largeman letting the rain fall on him in the bottom of that quarry.

And we haven’t even talked about the music. I went home for the Bellville Street Fair after seeing this film for the first time and I distinctly remember talking to my friend Josh about how much we loved the soundtrack. It was everywhere. I listened to Colin Hay’s “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” the first time my boyfriend dumped me (I would like to note that I did get over the person I dated for a few months when I was eighteen…but I’m not trying to trivialize my feelings at the time!). I loved “Blue Eyes” because, you guessed it, that boyfriend had blue eyes. I got very into Frou Frou. I’m trying to think of any soundtrack since then that’s had such a cultural impact…like, maybe the Barbie soundtrack? Obviously we don’t listen to soundtracks in the same way these days, but also…no one’s doing it like Zach Braff! He left it all on the court with this one.

We can make fun of this movie all we want, and listen, there’s a lot to make fun of. But Zach Braff did something extraordinary. He made a movie that spoke directly to specific young people at a specific time. I don’t know about you, but this movie spoke directly to me. Watching this film now is rough, and I can’t say I relate to much of it other than as a comedy (again, there are some very good jokes!), but there was one scene that got me. This is when Andrew and Natalie Portman are talking in a pool:

Andrew: You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.

Natalie Portman: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew: You'll see one day when you move out…it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Uh-oh!  I’m feeling an emotion! You got me good, Zach Braff. I might not be eighteen anymore (praise the Lord), but a coming-of-age story can still hit me right in the heart.

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Stray thoughts:

-Certainly no director has ever had such an unsurprising Criterion Top 10 list, right? Zach Braff lists Harold and Maude, Rushmore, and The Graduate amongst his favorite films. The similarities to The Graduate are especially obvious (the pool! The Simon and Garfunkel!) and you can definitely see how he was inspired by Wes Anderson’s aesthetics.

-One scene that I actually can’t get over is the ending, where Andrew’s/Zach Braff’s Jersey accent seems much stronger than it did in the rest of the film, and where he tells Natalie Portman he has to leave in kind of a weird baby talk voice? When he said “but right now I gotta goooo” I was viscerally uncomfortable.

-I have so much respect for filmmakers who can respond to criticism generously (like Cameron Crowe), and I really love what Zach Braff said about the movie in this interview: “Of course I've heard and respect the criticism, but I was a very depressed young man who had this fantasy of a dream girl coming along and saving me from myself…I just feel lucky that I get to make stuff. I can't really dwell on it. . . No one said being a creative person was easy, but you have to be vulnerable and authentically yourself. Otherwise, what's the point? Your skin gets tougher. When you're young, you're very vulnerable. But I've been doing this for 20 years now. You get used to it."

What a great, healthy attitude. And he’s right! I’m proud of my earliest work and also I wouldn’t necessarily want to be judged on it forever.

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A few questions:

Do I still like this movie? It’s complicated! I had a good time watching it.

How did watching this movie as an adult make me feel? A little cozy, a little embarrassed. But overall much better than Ghost World made me feel.

What did Roger Ebert think? Three stars! “This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail, as when Andrew arrives at work in Los Angeles and notices that the spigot from a gas pump, ripped from its hose when he drove away from a gas station, is still stuck in his gas tank. Something like that tells you a lot about a person's state of mind.” That’s the closing paragraph of his review…ol’ Rog knew how to end things.

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Coming up: more Flashback Summer/Fall! I’m trying my best to corral my thoughts on Annie Hall but it’s difficult. Also: next month paid subscribers will get the first post in my Alice series read-a-long. It’s gonna be a lot of fun! See you soon. xo