Garden State

Zach Branff

This was a very good freshman effort - I realize that he wrote it in the space of several months while had already gotten the role (which was his big break) on "Scrubs" and that he was basically killing time before pre-production began (I read this all on an interview), so he rather had the opportunity to write this screenplay undisturbed by other jobs.

Which was good. Actually, to me, this movie can really be described as this decades "The Graduate" There's no Mrs. Robinson . . . actually it's what The Graduate would have been withOUT Mrs. Robinson, but it has all of that "early-twentysomething what-am-I-going-to-do with my life" self-induced angst.

Boy comes back home for his mother's funeral, after being away for several years. All his friends are not really friends anymore, just strangers in the bodies of people he used to know. The deal between him and his dad is pretty strange, and there's always the haunting thought that his mother's accidental death in the bathtub was truly a husband-assisted suicide. Add this to the fact that Branff's character has never had a good relationship with his dad, because of the childhood accident (caused by the boy) which left his mother an invalid, caused his dad (a psychiatrist) to keep the boy on psychotropic meds throughout his formative years

- which explains the dreamlike quality and his inability to express any real emotion.

Put into the mix the girl - Natalie Portman - who is the typical "sprite" (which is what I call that particular archetype of the vibrant free-spirited, yet slightly off-the-wall character whose main purpose in the movie is to bring our anti-heroic "catcher-in-the-rye"-esque main character out of his shell).

However you describe it, Portman saves the film - not just her character but in the way she plays it.

All in all, this is the type of movie that would be written by a first-timer, and someone working out the doldrums of being young, but in all honesty it shows that he can pull off a good character or two (there are some minor characters who are extremely charming) and I hope that Branff actually has more movies in him. You can tell that the writer of this film could be great.

VG