REEL REFLECTIONS

IS THERE LIFE AFTER PROZAC?
A Review of "Garden State"

David Greiser

Isuppose each generation of parents inflicts its unique form of psychological damage on its children. My father’s generation raised its boys to be tough and manly and unemotional. In reaction, my father raised me to be his buddy and peer. My generation, the boomers, is engaged in raising offspring whose emotions are blunted by prescription medications.

"Garden State" is the offbeat tale of one such overmedicated millennial. Zach Braff (of TV’s sitcom "Scrubs") directs and stars in this quirky and dryly funny indie that debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. There, Braff openly invited comparisons between his film and the generational film of the 1960s, "The Graduate." Having seen both, I think there are parallels and also contrasts.

Both films feature main characters who are passive and puzzled by life. "Garden States’" Andrew Largeman (played by Braff) is passive because he has been in a drug-induced stupor, feeling nothing since the age of nine. That was when his mother fell over an open dishwasher door and hit her head on the sink, causing the injury that made her a paraplegic and put her in a wheelchair.

As the film begins, Andrew, a waiter and aspiring actor in California (his one film credit is the role of a retarded quarterback in a cable TV movie), receives word that his mother has drowned in the bathtub. Leaving his cabinet full of anti-depressants behind, Andrew returns home to New Jersey for the funeral.

There he reconnects with high school friends, two of whom happen to be the gravediggers at his mother’s funeral. He also falls in love with Sam ( played by Natalie Portman), a girl he meets at the doctor’s office , where he has gone to investigate the side effects of his withdrawal from lithium.

Providing a counterpoint to these developments is Andrew’s relationship to his psychiatrist father Gideon (played by Ian Holm). It is Gideon who has provided the many medicines that, until now, have "helped" Andrew to survive life. Gideon is certain that his son will never be psychologically healthy until he is able to acknowledge that, in his anger, he actually pushed his mother into the dishwasher and has never forgiven himself for the deed.

Andrew’s version of events is that he was only a kid at the time, the dishwasher had a broken door, and his father’s expert analysis is a crock. As the story progresses, we sense Gideon’s intense anger toward his son and toward life in general, simmering just below the surface.

Gradually Andrew’s downbeat friends lure him back into the world of relationships and emotions. There is a touching scene in which Sam captures Andrew’s first actual tear in a Dixie Cup. Along the way we meet a smorgasbord of alienated underachievers, including a friend’s mother who tokes pot along with her son and a couple who live in a boat at the bottom of a quarry.

The movie suggests that director Zach Braff is a writer and director of real promise. Braff has a great eye for detail (my favorite tidbit is the shot of a doctor’s office wall so full of diplomas and honors that one ends up on the ceiling). The characters in this film are crafted with enough quirky originality to suggest real people. The tone walks a thin balance-beam between dark comedy and touching melancholy.

There is room for directorial growth here, too: The soundtrack is didactic, with a song placed alongside each revelatory moment in a manner that suggests too obviously that it is intended as commentary. There seem to be two endings: an "unfinished" but true-to-life ending, followed by a happy ending that appears to have been added to enhance commercial appeal.

The film also contrasts modern and postmodern generational values. Gideon, Andrew’s father, believes the modern myth that human behavior is capable of being explained in rational, psychological categories. Andrew concludes that uncertainty in such matters feels truer. Gideon exalts the mind; for Andrew, authentic experience is what counts.

I heard it said that "Garden State" represents the end of a cinematic cycle, begun in the mid-1960s, that inveighed against the emptiness of suburban life. In "The Graduate," an early classic in that cycle, the enemy was the corporate world, typified in the famous reference to "plastics." Then "American Beauty" (1999) culminated the cycle, suggesting it was the material rat race that causes people to miss the subtle beauties infused into life’s little moments. In "Garden State," director Braff delves into the world of his own suburban childhood and discovers that, even among the underachievers and the ne’er-do-wells, suburbia yields its diamonds.

—Dave Greiser dwells, with the help of prescription medications, in the suburb of Telford, Pennsylvania. He is a pastor and part-time seminary teacher.