Garden State

After my second viewing of "Garden State," I realized a few things about the film.

First off, the whole movie essentially says this--this life is all we have, so we need to be with the ones we love. I know that when Andrew Largeman says this to his father, he dwindles between accepting contentment with where we are now, and doubting any form of afterlife. I'm pretty sure he chooses the latter, which saddens me; because if this life is all there is, and we have to make the most of every moment, because the only thing that matters is having fun and feeling loved; if that's all we have to live for and then we die and it all means nothing after that, then that fucking sucks. Seriously.

That means that everything we do is only for our own pleasure, and we don't mean anything. God. If we are only here to find love and feel accepted and feel good and learn and eat and then die, then the purpose of our lives are the fulfillment of our desires. Hedonism is god. Let us run wild and free, chasing the temptations of our bodies and souls, capturing them and allowing them to please our appetites until our legs twitch again, and another temptation finds our feet sprinting after their empty golden promises of happiness, satisfaction, and peace.

"Garden State" is a film I like when I don't think about it. For some reason, it feels good. It feels smart and sophisticated, and it being a bildungsroman makes me like it, because that is the genre I'm currently captivated with. It's funny, Natalie Portman's Sam is cute and cool, Zach Braff is cool; essentially, it's a movie of cool stuff.

In one scene, Largeman screams into an "infinite" abyss. I found this interesting about which to speculate. Why is he screaming? Is it venting from the built up anger about how he feels about paralyzing his mom? About her death? About the medications he seemingly no longer needs? About his controlling father? About the feelings he has inside of him that he doesn't understand but knows are torturing him? My sister speculated that maybe he was screaming into a place big enough to hold his problems. Maybe he was screaming to God, or what seemed like God. When he can't articulate words, he just makes sounds as loud as he can, and he feels better.

In a nutshell, this is what "Garden State" says: be yourself, love is out there for you and soothes the heartache like nothing else can, forgive others, and have a really cool soundtrack. It tries to say things that have been said before (kind of like what I did in this review). But it's different, cuz Zach Braff is saying it.