Exploring The Infinite Abyss
Once in a while a small movie comes along that connects with a young audience in a big way. In the sixties we had The Graduate, the seventies Grease, the eighties The Breakfast Club, the nineties The Avengers... well maybe not that last one. The point is that in the year of our lord 2004, Garden State is the hook that confused twenty-somethings can hang their coat on; a melding of absurd comedy, subtle romance and observation of the little everyday things in life that make us smile or scowl.
Garden State is the debut of Zach Braff, best known as Dr John Dorien in Scrubs, and is largely pieced together from moments in his own life. "I say that about 75% of the movie is true, it just didn't necessarily happen to me," he smiles. "I would write down anecdotes and scenarios on scraps of paper, and when I went to film school I ended up with this box of notes and it was from those stories that I started weaving together what would eventually become the movie." So is he as neurotic as his character Large? "I would say the character of Large is really where I was at when I was 26. I was living in Los Angeles, waiting tables - that conversation in the Vietnamese restaurant is word for word the exchange I had with a group of people one time. I really experienced this lost, lonesome feeling in my 20s. I've started to think that your teen years are your body's puberty and your 20s are your mind's puberty. But no-one really ever tells you that."
Braff plays struggling actor Andrew Largeman, who is stuck in an existential rut. A phonecall from his estranged father brings the news that his mother has just died and he is required to come home for the funeral. There Large meets up with his old schoolfriend Mark, who spends his time digging graves and getting stoned. They team up after the funeral and go to a party hosted by another school-chum who made millions on "silent Velcro" and there, after being stuck on medication since he was 11, Large finally starts to cut loose. The next day he goes to see a doctor about his headaches and whilst in the waiting room meets Sam, a sparky local girl who has a tendency to tell little white lies. Gradually they get to know each other and find they have a lot of things in common. Such as funerals.
When it came to casting, Braff got his dream choices of Ian Holm as Large's father Gideon, and Natalie Portman as the lover-of-white-lies that is Sam. Braff recalls when he first received the call from Holm: "I've always been such an incredible fan of his. I'd obviously seen so many of the films he's done but The Sweet Hereafter a couple of years ago was one in particular that moved me a great deal. So we offered him the part. I was on the set of Scrubs, and we were in the middle of a scene and my phone rang and he said 'Zach, it's Ian Holm'. I went 'oh my God', and he said 'no, Ian Holm'. That's when he said he wanted to play Gideon. He was incredibly gracious, for a man of that stature to take direction from me, this kid, I thought was incredibly generous of him. I hope he'll be in every movie I make."
For Natalie Portman the chance to play a part in a small film after the epic Star Wars films was a welcome change. "It's a film that doesn't really fit into any genre," she explains. "Movies now are so often made to mimic other successful movies - the romantic comedy, the thriller, the action movie - which are so formulaic that you can guess the ending after the first five minutes. So it was nice to see something like this that was much messier, like life, that doesn't fit into any category, that doesn't go with anything we've seen before." Despite being so busy, Portman somehow found the time to attend university, working on movies only during her summer break. "It was never really a question for me, it was something I'd always wanted to do. To be an actor you have to be a person who's engaged in the world, whether that's through school or through travel or through meeting people and listening to them and learning about peoples' lives I think that's the most important thing. You're trying to imagine other peoples' lives and where imagination takes you. Having knowledge and first hand experience can really feed that imagination. So it was never really a question for me, university was an amazing experience."
But fame has an odd effect on your friends, as Braff discovered when he first started out in the business, doing after-school specials and getting a small part in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery: "I was working as a waiter but when I came home, because I had been in a couple of things, I was really commenting in the film on my friends' warped view of what celebrity and Hollywood was actually like. There I was getting screamed at, waiting tables in a Vietnamese restaurant in Beverly Hills and they have this image of me on ecstasy, hanging out with the beautiful people at poolside. Or that I was living in OJ Simpson's mansion smoking stogies with Playboy Playmates." Portman, who also had an early role in a Woody Allen film (Everybody Says I Love You) , is a little more philosophical about her transition from child to adult star: "It's interesting," she notes, "because my generation of female actors is largely made up of people who started acting as children. If you look at Kirsten Dunst, Scarlett Johansson, Christina Ricci, Claire Danes, we all started out when we were 11 or 12. I don't know what it is about our generation, but I obviously have some good peers and we keep pushing each other I guess."
A movie about Generation X needs a Generation X soundtrack, and Braff was lucky enough to get most of the songs he wanted: "I wanted it to be the music that I felt was scoring my life, particularly while I was writing it. First and foremost that meant Coldplay and Colin Hay and a couple of other bands. So what I did was put together this CD. Whenever I gave out the script to try to get people to finance the film I would also give them the CD saying this would be the soundtrack never really imagining that I'd be able to get these amazing bands. In fact when they first came back with how much they wanted, you could have made a short film for the amount of money they were asking for and rightly deserved. Eventually we were able to show them, one by one, the scenes in which I wanted to place the music. And, credit to the artists, they were unbelievably generous. I wrote them impassioned letters, and we showed Coldplay the first ten minutes of the movie and they told us we could have it pretty much for nothing. I'll always be grateful to them for that."
Garden State is a remarkable debut, right up there with American Beauty and Donnie Darko, yet it remains to be seen if Braff will continue on this highly successful path or veer off and crash in the dunes like John Carpenter. One thing is for sure though: Garden State succeeds thanks to its universal themes of loneliness and growing up, and has instantly quotable dialogue that Tarantino might have cooked up had he been a twenty-something slacker from New Jersey ("Does it come with balloons?" "What am I? A clown? No! It does not come with balloons!"). Sure to become a cult (and possibly mainstream) classic, this is nothing short of essential viewing.
Tom Ramsbottom
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