Garden State
Every week on "Scrubs," Zach Braff plays a wisecracking ER doctor. The show is a comedy and Braff usually attacks it with goofy faces and bumbling slapstick. The only vestige of the sitcom to make its way into "Garden State," Braff's directorial debut, is the hospital's clinical air. The movie is set in the McMansions, manses, and modest homes of New Jersey, and a prescription-drug fog hangs over the thing, as if the entire picture were Paxilized.
The story is one of those homecoming numbers, with Braff, who also wrote the script, playing Andrew Largeman, the returnee. Andrew lives a rather comatose existence in Los Angeles, where he works at a Vietnamese restaurant while trying to get a serious acting career going. He wanders from one pretty, stylized set piece to the next, his face a wall of disaffection.
Largeman's life is interrupted -- and his mopey shtick enhanced -- with the news that his paraplegic mother has drowned. Her funeral brings him back to New Jersey for the first time in nine years, where, over a few days, he avoids his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm); resumes his friendship with Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), now a gravedigger at a Jewish cemetery; and falls for Sam (Natalie Portman), a weirdo who recognizes him from his role as a mentally retarded quarterback as she and Andrew sit in a hospital lobby waiting for shrink appointments.
"Garden State" is a standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.
As the nature of Andrew's funk is explained, you kind of expect a charged-up catharsis, for the movie to plug in and go electric. And "Garden State" always seems ready for a primal scream that comes sooner and louder than the well-filmed one Braff gives us toward the end. His talent for constructing set pieces and conjuring moods snuffs out the movie's natural vitality. Nick Drake and the Shins on the soundtrack; the drugs; the apparent but unspoken sense that life has underwhelmed all these people: It's overdone.
"Garden State" comes close to a great generational statement, but the film is fixated on Andrew's withdrawal and his reliance on the drugs his father has put him on. He's not given a fair shot at the disaffection of his cinematic forebears, especially Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," a movie that, with its unmoored protagonist, is on Braff's mind. Where Ben was testy, Andrew is tuned out. Braff's performance sits somewhere between sleep and sarcasm, situating itself nicely in this year's pantheon of "emo" heroes.
Even once Andrew "wakes up," he's upstaged by the movie's stylistic eccentricity. It's not simply that everyone is messed up in "Garden State"; they're ironically, poetically screwy. (Even the animals here have lyrical disorders.)
Francois Truffaut tended to beautify zaniness. But Truffaut's movies were joyful and eccentric. The American version of Truffaut is nearly always self-consciously dreary, as though his progeny don't believe that art and fun should mix. The two most joyfully exuberant American movies of the last 10 years are "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore," both directed by Wes Anderson, whose influence also seems to be coursing through Braff's bloodstream.
Certainly Braff knows how to inspire vivid acting. Sarsgaard and especially Portman are unbelievably naturalistic; the rest of the cast, namely Jean Smart as Sarsgaard's druggy-cool mom, is uniformly terrific, too.
But Braff shares a problem with Anderson and early Truffaut: overprotectiveness. He's too in love with his characters to risk letting them live on their own.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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