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What a huge success in our video store! How long and how often Garden State has been awarded over and over again! Andrew Largeman, the hero from Garden State, seems schizophrenic. He lies flat on his back in his bed in an almost unfurnished room. Only the answering machine is running. It's his father who tells Andrew that his mother drowned in the bathtub. Andrew stands up and takes a look into his medicine cabinet, where - perfectly arranged! - different doses of sedatives lined up. We learn that Andrew is a would-be actor who once appeared somewhere in a production for cable television. He works in a Vietnamese restaurant and hasn't been home in New Jersey in nine years. The moment he leaves his pills behind to board the plane home to New Jersey, his life starts moving again for the first time in nine years... Garden State was written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff also plays Andrew, whom I would describe as at least dubious. At home he meets his father Gideon (Ian Holm), extremely dry and distant. Gideon is a psychiatrist and is convinced that Andrew will only like himself again then, "until you forgive yourself for what you did to your mother." Gideon blames Andrew for pushing his mother, for falling over the dishwasher and being paralyzed ever since. Andrew finds that he was just a little boy when that happened. The dishwasher was loosely locked and that in turn is the fault of the father, who had not taken care of it! Andrew's new life begins when he recognizes the gravediggers at his mother's grave. They're old friends from school. Soon he will be full of amphetamines and spin the bottle at a party. And very soon he will fall in love with Sam (Natalie Portman), who is just as strange. Sam's a girl from New Jersey and one of those characters that just shows up at the movies, right? She is DA for Andrew - always and at any time! Full of desire and she really wants it. Sam looks as beautiful as Natalie Portman, but apart from a few kind qualities we don't learn much about her. Then there's Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), Andrew's schoolmate, who lives in the shallows of nature in New Jersey (and isn't that a world like Oz?) Mark is a stoner with funny friends like this couple living on a raise in the middle of a quarry. Andrew wakes slowly from a long, blunt nothing. He tries to talk to his father and to understand his feelings. A huge puzzle lies in front of him and nobody represents it better than Sam. What's he gonna do with her now? After all, Andrew has kept his romantic feelings to himself since his first girlfriend (when he was a boy)! I've always compared Garden State to The_Graduate, especially because both heroes are so passive. Compared to everything that penetrates them from the outside, they react almost motionless - and Garden State also offers a song by Simon & Garfunkel! But The_Graduate takes a critical look at the world in which Benjamin lives, while Garden State critically questions only Andrew's OWN world. Everyone Andrew meets is harassing him in one way or another. All except Andrew's father, whose hatred is so deep that he prefers to anaesthetise his son (because the pills in Andrew's cupboard were prescribed by Gideon). Garden State is a gentle comedy with great attention to detail. Like when Andrew finds out in L.A. that the faucet at the gas station is still in the tank hole in his car. If that doesn't say anything about the thought world of Andrew Largeman?
