Yes You Can
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song — the song that someone had to create. All that counts is that the song is performed without guile and without pretense.
The Shins — guys who wear their pet sounds and rubber souls on their shirtsleeves — make music like that. Their albums sound like memories of old songs, old thoughts and old emotions — the kind of stuff that will “change your life, I swear,” says Sam, the girl in the movie Garden State who will change the life of a boy in need of drastic alteration. Sam (Natalie Portman, reminding us how wondrous she can be when not choking on George Lucas’ dry variant of the English language) lies to make herself more interesting, and Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff from TV’s Scrubs, also the film’s writer and director) lies to pay the rent. Andrew is a small-screen actor best known for playing “the retarded quarterback” in a made-for-TV movie. Andrew acts, he says, because he’s only comfortable in other people’s skin.
Sam and Andrew, who goes by “Large,” strike up their relationship in a doctor’s waiting room. She tells him she’s there with a friend, which is a lie. He tells her he’s there because of a sudden onslaught of splitting headaches, the result of his having quit the antidepressants his father, a psychiatrist played by Ian Holm, has been prescribing since Andrew was 9, when something tragic happened in the Largeman household. It doesn’t take us long to find out what that bad thing is. Large spills it to Sam just before their like turns to love. The movie is not about hidden secrets but rather about the effect they have on people who don’t know how to cope with bad things and don’t believe in good things when they finally happen.
Garden State‘s plot is overly familiar: A struggling actor ditches his job as a waiter to come home to a brown-grass-and-gray-skies Unpleasantville (suburban New Jersey). The actor is reunited with his old pals, who refer to him as “Jersey’s De Niro,” sort of reverently and sort of sarcastically. He meets a beautiful, quirky girl who will change his life. And so it goes — look homeward, Large. (The name “Largeman” is a rookie mistake. He’s small; we get it.)
But Garden State, with its strange detours and loving details, is too personal to be dismissed; it wants to be liked but doesn’t beg for your affection. Braff populates his movie with likeable characters, from Sam’s ingenuously affectionate mom to Andrew’s old pal Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who smokes dope and robs graves but has only good intentions toward old friends. Even Holm’s Gideon Largeman isn’t a bad guy; he just doesn’t know how to talk to his own son, especially now that he’s emerging as someone who can feel for himself. Garden State charms with ease and moves with grace; it’s warm but never mushy, languorous but never groggy, rueful but never despondent. It’s like a perfect pop song, that thing that makes you smile and tear up at the same time.
Braff, winsome and just shy of whiny on Scrubs, plays Large as damaged goods, but he isn’t looking for sympathy. He’s just a guy without a home. “A family,” he figures, “is just a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”
