Garden State

"They will see us waving from such great heights, 'Come down now,' they'll say..."

My friend Michael and I view Garden State differently.

As a high school drama teacher for several years, Michael obviously spent most of his time around teenagers, many of whom were medicated and impressionable. To him, Garden State appeared to send the message that if you stop your meds, you'll be fine. You might even feel better than ever. He found the implication reckless, and the film fundamentally flawed as a result.

I don't want to speak too much for Michael; he's entitled to see the film his way and I don't begrudge him a different opinion. In fact, I see the logic of his opinion a lot more clearly now (probably because I've been exposed to a few hundred more at-risk college students in the last several years, and some days I fear the future). I didn't see the film that way at the time, though.

For me, Garden State was a watershed film that seemed to echo and therefore validate the work of Hal Ashby, Billy Wilder, and Cameron Crowe all over again. Zach Braff made me feel a little less weird for loving their quiet, quirky little character pieces so much, when none of my friends and few of my students had the patience to see what I saw.

In 2004, I'd just started teaching screenwriting to college students, and Garden State validated much of what I thought about storytelling, even underscoring many of the same lessons I was trying to teach.

As a writer, the film also gave me hope that, yeah, the stories I like to tell might have an audience after all. I had just started writing scripts again, and I was trying to capture little moments rather than high concepts. I was still a year away from starting a full-length script, but I'd be lying if I said Garden State didn't influence my ideas.

My script had a protagonist who went home after a long absence and had to deal with the loss of his mother and with the presence of his odd, distant father. My details were different, but the template was there. Shell-of-a-guy goes home, can't connect with his dad, meets plucky girl, and magically gets his life in order while indie rock plays on the soundtrack. There's a whole subgenre of these films now.

In a way, that script continues to haunt me. I wrote my protagonist's mother out because I had no relationship with my own mother at the time, and I didn't know how to imagine one.

Compared to the rest of Braff's career thus far, Garden State looks like an astonishing high water mark — a film (and soundtrack) that spoke to a generation of listless wanderers and continues to do so today.

I wonder if my own high water mark is ahead of me or behind. I find myself thinking about that script, and whether I can even do that again. I think about Mom and all the things I should've said, and consider writing that shit down. I wonder if what I'm feeling means a thing, and if she understands me at all now.