Garden State (film)

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Garden State
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Zach Braff
Written by	Zach Braff
Starring	Zach Braff Natalie Portman Peter Sarsgaard Jackie Hoffman Ian Holm
Music by	Alexi Murdoch Chad Fischer
Cinematography	Lawrence Sher
Editing by	Myron I. Kerstein
Distributed by	Fox Searchlight
Release date(s)	July 28, 2004
Running time	102 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$2,500,000
Gross revenue	$35,825,316

Garden State is a film written and directed by, and starring, Zach Braff, with Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and co-starring Sir Ian Holm. The film centers on Andrew Largeman (Braff), a 26-year-old actor/waiter who returns to his hometown in New Jersey after his mother dies. The title alludes both to the nickname for New Jersey, and to lines from Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden", "Such was that happy garden-state,/ While man there walked without a mate:"

It was filmed over 25 days in April and May 2003 and released on July 28, 2004. The main setting and primary shooting location was New Jersey.^[1] It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. The film won Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. The film contains many allusions to the similar coming of age film The Graduate (1967), most notably the opening airplane scene that both pictures share.

Garden State was well received, and is considered a major success for Scrubs actor Zach Braff as it was his feature film debut as a director.^[2] Lacking the publicity machine of most mainstream Hollywood films, it generated a devoted fan base from people who read and responded to Braff's blog on the film's official site. Fans drove hours to see the film and saw it repeatedly in theaters.^[2] The film also spawned a popular soundtrack for which Braff, who picked the music himself, won a Grammy award.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Themes 3 Cast 4 Production 5 Music 6 Reception 6.1 Awards 6.2 DVD 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Plot

Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) wakes up from a bizarre nightmare in which he is on a crashing plane to a telephone message from his father, telling Andrew that he needs to return home because his mother has just died.

Andrew leaves Los Angeles and returns home to the state of New Jersey to attend his mother's funeral. He recognizes the gravediggers as old friends Mark (Peter Sarsgaard)and Dave (Alex Burns) who invite him to a party that night. After smoking marijuana, he takes ecstasy (after refusing cocaine) at the party, but remains detached, and is also impressed by the abundant usage of drugs; indeed, this is the last time he's seen taking any drugs. At home, Andrew had his father book a doctor's appointment for headaches he's been having.

The morning after the party, Andrew proceeds to his doctor's appointment, meeting in the waiting room a girl named Sam, a pathological liar. She will later explain that most times she does not know why she lies, it's like a tic; but still one can trust her to admit her lies. During the scene, she tells him to listen to her music, saying it will change his life, and he does listen to and appreciate the song. In Andrew's meeting with his doctor, it's revealed that Andrew has been on lithium and other mood stabilizers, as well as anti-depressants, for his entire adult life, but has stopped taking them. He also says that his father, who is also his psychiatrist, put him on the medications in the first place. Andrew finds Sam outside of the office, eventually offering her a ride home. Sam invites him to her house, and he meets her mother. After returning home Andrew's father confronts him, and is insistent that they have a talk before Andrew leaves town.

In the next scene we see Andrew staring at Mark while he digs a grave, while another of Andrew's friends states that the town is "so messed up" because of drug usage, even if he's not exempt from it. This usage is also depicted directly in a number of scenes throughout the movie.

Andrew then returns to Sam's house, and the two spend the rest of the day together joining his friends later. Andrew tells her that when he was nine years old he pushed his mother, resulting in an accident that left her a paraplegic; he says that he believes his father blames him for his wife's paralysis, and put him on his medications to "protect him" from the anger he supposedly harbors. Sam listens non-judgmentally, and Andrew subsequently expresses his interest in her.

The next day Mark tells Andrew that he needs help "tracking down" a going-away present for him. Sam, Andrew, and Mark spend the day tracking the present down, ending in a quarry in Newark where Mark talks to Albert and his wife, a couple who've been employed to watch the area, who also do modest antique jewelry sales. They then discuss the reasons for which Albert and his wife chose to live there. The house is described by Albert as "his private ark", a possible reference to the working title of the movie, "Large's Ark"^{[citation needed]}. Also, living there and exploring the abyss which was found in the quarry is described as "doing something that's completely unique, that's never been done before", a direct quote from Sam's earlier speech; but finally, Albert explains that what actually matters is just his family, and the camera shows right afterward the listening Sam and Andrew. A few moments later, the two of them kiss each other for the first time, after shouting at the infinite abyss, which shows Andrew is starting to have feelings again.

When they look at the gift, it turns out to be Andrew's mother's favorite pendant, that Mark had taken away from her grave and probably sold. Afterwards, Andrew approaches his father for the talk the father had suggested, in which he says he was not to blame for his mother's accident and that, from now on, he will live his life without medication. He nevertheless forgives his father, and says he wants to build a better relationship with him.

The morning after, Andrew says his goodbyes to Sam at the airport, acknowledging that she did change his life, and leaves for his plane that will take him back to his life in Los Angeles, to fix his problems before continuing the relationship. We later see Sam desperately crying just before Andrew unexpectedly returns, telling Sam that he doesn't want to waste any more of his life "without her in it."

[edit] Themes

The protagonist's father has been “protecting” him from his own feelings with pills, namely lithium, which are seen “as the symbolic soul-destroying enemy”.^[3]

Zach Braff describes the themes of the movie as, “love, for lack of a better term. And it’s a movie about awakening. It’s a movie about taking action. It’s a movie about how life is short, go for it now. My character says, ‘I’m 26 years old and I’ve spent my whole life waiting for something else to start. Now I realize that this is all there is and I’m going to try to live my life like that’”.^[4] “I have this theory that your body goes through puberty in its teens, and the mind goes through puberty in your twenties,” he says. “[Andrew] is dealing with issues that you are going through all the time going into your thirties,” he says of his character. “He’s lost and lonesome, which is something I definitely felt in my twenties”.^[5]

[edit] Cast

• Zach Braff as Andrew Largeman - A depressed, pill-popping young actor who also waits tables for a Vietnamese restaurant. When he was nine years old he inadvertently crippled his mother by pushing her over a dishwasher door. He hasn't cried, or really felt any significant emotions for several years, mainly as a result of the medication he's been plied with by his estranged father.
• Natalie Portman as Sam - An eccentric epileptic and pathological liar, who openly admits her casual deception and frequently ponders what makes her do it. She lives with her equally peculiar mother and adopted African sibling, Titembay.
• Ian Holm as Gideon Largeman - Andrew's father and professional psychiatrist, whose passive demeanour hides a deep-seated rage. He still blames Andrew for his late wife's paralysis, and has thus kept him in a lithium induced haze ever since.
• Peter Sarsgaard as Mark - An old school friend of Andrew's, now working as a grave-digger. He still lives with his mother and smokes marijuana, frequently attending wild parties; he makes considerable amounts of money by stealing jewelry from the people he buries and exploiting loopholes in store return policies.
• Jean Smart as Carol - Mark's mother
• Jackie Hoffman as Sylvia Largeman - Andrew's aunt, who sings Lionel Ritchie's "Three Times a Lady" at her sister-in-law's funeral.
• Method Man as Diego - A bellhop at a luxury hotel who hosts peeping sessions of various hotel rooms.
• Armando Riesco as Jesse - Another school friend of Mark and Andrew's who has made a fortune and bought a mansion on money he has earned from inventing a silent alternative to Velcro fabric.
• Alex Burns as Dave
• Ron Liebman as Dr. Cohen - A neurologist whom Andrew visits at the beginning of the film.
• Denis O'Hare in a cameo appearance^[6] as Albert, one of the "guardians of the abyss".

[edit] Production

Garden State was Braff’s feature directing and writing debut. The title of the film was originally intended to be Large's Ark in reference to Braff's character (note that Albert mentions his own ark in the movie), but he changed it because no one understood what it meant.^[7] Garden State was filmed on a budget of $2.5 million.^{[citation needed]} Most of the film was shot on location in Braff's home town of South Orange, New Jersey,^[1] with filming taking place at Cranford, Livingston, Maplewood, Newark, South Orange, Tenafly and Wallington. Although the majority of the filming was done in New Jersey, filming also took place in New York City and Los Angeles.

Braff has cited such films as Harold and Maude, Woody Allen films (specifically Annie Hall and Manhattan), and the films of Alexander Payne as influences on Garden State.^[8] Parallels have also been drawn between Braff's film and Ted Demme's Beautiful Girls (1996). Braff wrote the script during his college years when Beautiful Girls was in theatres, and his first choice for the love interest was Natalie Portman, who plays a similar role in Demme's film.^[9]

The film is partly autobiographical, depicting Braff's own emotions and mentality while he was writing the screenplay. He described that "When I wrote Garden State, I was completely depressed, waiting tables and lonesome as I've ever been in my life. The script was a way for me to articulate what I was feeling; alone, isolated, 'a dime a dozen' and homesick for a place that didn't even exist."^[10]

[edit] Music

The music that accompanied the film was hand-picked by Zach Braff. Commenting on the selections, Braff said that "Essentially, I made a mix CD with all of the music that I felt was scoring my life at the time I was writing the screenplay."^[11] Braff used many artists he used in other works including his friend Joshua Radin.

Braff accepted a Grammy Award in 2005 for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. The film's trailer won an award for best music at the Golden Trailer Awards. The Broadcast Film Critics Association nominated it for best soundtrack.

[edit] Reception

The film was first screened on January 16, 2004, at the Sundance Film Festival where it was purchased in a joint venture by Fox Searchlight Pictures and Miramax for USD $5 million, double the film's budget. Fox Searchlight Pictures president Peter Rice said of the film, "Having enjoyed the film immensely, we look forward to working with Miramax to bring Garden State to audiences worldwide."^[12] From March until mid July, it screened at other various film festivals until it received a limited release on July 28 in North America. It became only the fourth non-documentary feature to top the chart that year, as calculated by per screen average, since Memorial Day weekend.^[13] Stephen Gilula, president of distribution at Fox Searchlight, attributed the film's gradual success to word of mouth and a publicity tour by Braff leading up to the film's theatrical debut. Gilula said, "Zach [Braff] had a cross-country tour, and we [organized] word of mouth screenings, where we had to turn people away. Zach did Q&As following [the screenings]."^[13] From late 2004 through mid 2005, Garden State was shown at more festivals and was released in over 30 countries. Despite having a limited release in all its markets, the film was able to gather $35.8 million at the worldwide box office, of which about $26.7 million came from North America.^[14]

Garden State has an 87 percent "freshness" rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website.^[15]

[edit] Awards

In addition to being a nominee for the Grand Jury prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Braff received Best New Director from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Florida Film Critics Circle's Pauline Kael Breakout Award, Best Debut Director award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and Breakout of the Year from the Phoenix Film Critics Society.

[edit] DVD

After its limited release in theaters, the film gained more popularity during its DVD release on December 28, 2004, which includes commentaries, deleted scenes and featurettes.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Garden State

• Official site
• Zach Braff's blog
• Garden State at the Internet Movie Database
• Garden State at Allmovie
• Garden State at Rotten Tomatoes
• Garden State at Metacritic
• Anatomy of a Scene:  Garden State, from the Sundance Channel website