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Garden State
Queen Amidala In Love

Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Ian Holm, Peter Sarsgaard, Geoffrey Arend
Director: Zach Braff
Screenwriter: Zach Braff

Reviewed by P. Joshua Laskey

This is going to be an explanation of why I’m about to rave about a movie and then give it less than the full four stars. If you have a problem with complexity, subtlety, or veiled hypocrisy, you should probably stop reading.

If I were reading, I would stop; however, I am writing and that seems enough reason to continue.

Garden State is honest. That is not to say that every viewer will believe it, or relate to it, or like it, or trust it, or even agree with it. Surely, it is only honest, in my opinion. Garden State is a love story about love at first sight that builds slowly and almost unnoticed by those who are in love until suddenly they are overwhelmed by the very smallness and intimacy of the emotion. Garden State is honest because real life usually follows that romantic model.

Garden State is a date movie. That is not to say every viewer will get kissed, or embraced, or laid because he went. It is not to say that any viewer is going to turn her date into a sensitive, caring, “let’s talk” sort if he was not any of those things before seeing the movie. The magic of Garden State is too incisive to hit anyone over the head. Garden State seeped into me, and I imagine it will to the same to and for others. It contrasts the angst and meaninglessness of many young people with the magic surrounding all of them--all of us. Nietzsche declared that God was dead, and sometimes MTV seems to be insinuating that Love has followed suit. Garden State defies this warped and saddening worldview by taking Love out of the hands of cynical pornographers and hack poets and planting it firmly in the minds and hearts of those people still willing to take the long and winding journey it requires.

But there’s the rub. Cynical pornographers and hack poets have managed to dominate if not completely control the channels through which modern movies must pass on their ways from the imaginations of artists to the eyes of audience members. It is in those clogged and ugly channels that this movie loses a tiny bit of the sheen I believe was originally on it. A small luster is there in spirit but lost in translation because Zach Braff, the movie’s writer, director, and lead, seems to have said “Anything!!! Just let me make my movie!--Please.” That is not to say he sold out. Because he did not. He was pure, and true, and beautiful. And I thank him for getting his movie made. He did just the thing his movie elevates to heroic proportions: he compromised with reality because that’s all we’ve got. For that I give Braff six stars as writer, four as director, and four more as actor--which averages out to above a four on all four apparatuses. It feels like he had an Audrey Hepburn out of the blocks but, in order to finish the race, had to sex it up for the salacious, soul-finding executives.

Thankfully, however, he actually cast a spirit as beautiful as Hepburn’s opposite himself. Natalie Portman should win the Oscar (seriously) for her role in Garden State. Not the actual golden statuette so fraught with politics and gossip. She should win (or perhaps already has won) the spiritual Oscar--that award given in the spirit of good, honest, pure, true (yes, I’m repeating myself) work. As an actor myself, I salute Ms. Portman.

She did what all romantic leads ought to do--she made me fall sweetly in love with her character. For that, there is not rating system outside my own heart worthy of measuring against her. I’d give her the sky full of stars if I could just to begin to give her her due. BRAVO!!!

Then, there’s the soundtrack. Listen. It wraps the whole movie in a sonorous aura worthy of more stars.

I recommend this movie to anyone in their early adulthood--especially those of us banging our heads against coffeetables most nights we watch television. (Yes, I have been literally banging my head into a table lately.) Go take yourself on a date, and scorn the Hollywood executives who cost Braff his half star.

Rating:

(3 1/2 out of 4 stars)

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