Not "this year's" anything really

I finally saw Garden State, four months after I missed it at the Seattle International Film Festival, and probably a month and a half after its semi-wide release.

The result was something like the emotional upswell experienced by Zach Braff look-a-like and Garden State protagonist Andrew Largeman. He stops taking his pills. He usually takes lots of them. The pills he takes are prescribed to cure problems with his brain. He says they make him numb.

Amid the grass-roots, indie-fan love-fest this movie has enjoyed, numb is exactly what I was going for. Read no reviews, watch no trailers, wait it out, see the movie when it comes was my mantra. It was a hard pill, for the deluge was near-complete--I could brook no shelter. I was beset on all sides by surging, phantasmogoric buzz. Somehow I kept it at bay.

Sitting in the theatre was like surfacing from immersion in that sea.

Half-drowned and shivering, the movie unfolded itself with quirky characters and ham-fisted dialogue. Things happened that made me laugh. Things happened that made me groan. Things happened that made my capacity for suspension of disbelief nearly overheat from stress. Throughout, In the back of my mind was the one quote that had somehow evaded my filter and slipped in my buzz cortex. It now plagued me. Garden State is "this year's Lost in Translation."

It's not that at all actually. The poignancy of Lost in Translation was in its silent moments. It was the shared glances, ,the longing, the uncertainty on the faces of its characters that fueled the emotional payload that connected Sofia Coppola's dissertation on loneliness with audiences. Braff's face twitches so much you don't know what emotion he's going for--he might be trying for all of them at once, I really can't tell. Natalie Portman's character has epilepsy, which she plays like a severe case of ADHD. Tears flow and you're unsure where they've just come from.

The movie is funny. But the laughs are a completely unconnected series of kitschy sight gags and drug references. It sometimes feels as though the plot exists to suspend these things in a logical order. That's a shame.

A friend and I once had a conversation about Lost in Translation. He didn't like it because he said it offered up a problem without having the courage to put forth a solution. He's a smart guy and that's an excellent point. Coppola's movie was, though, complete and coherent.

Garden State is coherent certainly, but far from emotionally complete. It offers solutions to the existential, drug-addled dementia of its characters. The solutions though, are hackneyed and tired. It's a new gloss on the love conquers all motif. In forwarding that cause, the sometimes snappy, inventive dialogue becomes laughable, the plot sputters, the actors don't seem to know what to do with themselves.

It's a fun movie, but also kind of an unfortunate one.