Almost 40 years ago, “The Graduate” was released, and many still believe that the film epitomizes a generation. Twenty years after the baby boom, disillusioned college graduates struggled with the previous generation’s ideas about work, family and American politics, and “The Graduate” captured this on film. The main character, Benjamin, is out of college and living at home, reacting against pressure to focus on his dictated future.
Just over two years ago, “Garden State” was released, and to many of my peers, Zach Braff is no mere mortal: he is the directorial voice of our generation, a visionary, and at the very least a really relatable, cute guy.
In the film, Braff’s character Andrew Largeman is detached, self-involved, overmedicated and unreasonably bored. He has graduated from college and is working as a waiter in California when he is called home to New Jersey to attend his mother’s funeral. There, he mopes, looks down upon all his former classmates who still live in South Orange, and falls in love with Natalie Portman’s character Sam.
Sam is just as unlikable as Andrew. She is the ideal woman of the man who sees himself as far deeper than he really is. Some may claim that Sam’s character is a refreshing departure from the typically sexist portrayal of female leads in young romantic comedies, but in removing the vacant sexuality characteristic of most female leads, Braff doesn’t utilize the room he’s left to fill her with personality. She’s 26 but has no job, no sign of schooling, no maturity and no prospects. She’s a hollow shell of quirkiness, just waiting for Braff to come and discover her in all her disempowered love-ability. She buries one of a thousand gerbils she’s had as pets, is prone to spontaneous fits of child-like sound and movement, and wears an adorable little epilepsy helmet. Braff goes so far in his assertion that quirkiness is loveable that he attempts to characterize her epilepsy as just one more of those endearing quirks. And this prepubescent 26-year-old, Braff’s ideal, is so simple-minded that she claims that listening to a song by the Shins will change your life. A bold claim. Just as shallowly and falsely, Braff claims that “Garden State” should, and will, change your life.
The only other female characters in the film are mothers: one chain-smoking and uneducated, another a soft-spoken woman who offers Sam and Andrew tea, and the third would be Andrew’s mother who is dead. There’s also a thin blonde woman without any lines with whom Andrew almost has sex.
The one depiction of race in the film is a black man who leads Andrew and Sam to an abandoned hotel to watch two strangers have sex, as projected from a hole in the wall onto a big screen. This scene is absolutely as unnecessary as it sounds. It plays absolutely no role in the extremely thin plot.
In terms of class depictions, all of Largeman’s former-friends are lower class while he’s well-off, and as a result, they are depicted as cheating, stealing, stupid, and boring, while he depicts himself as intelligent and honest.
The film is just as mind-numbing visually as it is plot-wise, consisting of several obvious, heavily thought-out images and static visual gags strung together by barely an emotional tie or storyline. If this film is art, it works much better as a picture book.
People claim that this film defines our generation, and I find this problematic. But what may be more infuriating for me is that the claim may be accurate. I grew up in a town similar to South Orange. There, it’s common for people to graduate from college with no real sense of purpose, take too many anti-depressants, only think about themselves, and harbor unreasonable bitterness toward their parents. In “The Graduate,” Benjamin faces a genuine clash with society. Braff’s character, on the other hand, has nothing to clash against, so he flails, searching for a reason to be angry.
Braff has admitted to being inspired by and borrowing from “The Graduate.” This is quite an understatement. Braff blatantly steals from “The Graduate.” Whether its scene concepts, a mother who seduces younger men (Mrs. Robinson vs. Carol, Mark’s mother), or even use of Simon and Garfunkel in the soundtrack, Braff rehashes “The Graduate.” This plagiarism, perhaps, may be the true mark of our generation. In my opinion, we currently have no sense of cohesion or artistic voice leading the way. We have no John Lennon or Bob Dylan. We have Zach Braff.
There’s no particular point of view other than apathy that permeates our generation’s mindset, so we often claim the art of our parents’ generation and brand it as our own. However, we must first remove a real sense of message or originality in point of view. And from this comes “Garden State,” a film that’s pretentious, unoriginal and self-centered, yet extremely relatable. It’s a film that defines the disappointment in our generation, if not by us then by our predecessors.
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