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Garden State - Sweet and Ineffectual Garden State is a heady combination of innocence, saccharine sweetness, indifference, and inexpertise that never quite jells into a finished product. A few well-delivered monologues, some fabulous cinematography and a substantial performance by Natalie Portman fail to lift this film out of the rank and file. The film opens to a shot of our protagonist's nightmare of a plan crash. While all the people around him are crying, panicking, and otherwise coming to grips with their immanent death, our hero Andrew Largemen just sits there with a blank look on his face. Nothing fazes him - not the screaming stewardess, the bags falling from the overhead bins, or the 60-year-old woman on his left clutching his shirt and crying in his ear. Luckily, the phone rings, and Andrew wakes up to the sound of his father's voice. Unluckily, it's bad news: his mother has drowned in the bathtub. Thus Andrew, living in L.A. and estranged from his family for a decade, must return to his hometown in Jersey for the funeral. After the funeral, Andrew runs into a couple of his old high school friends. (It's just one of the film's many strange situations that these two particular friends now work as gravediggers and are waiting with a bulldozer to fill in his mother's grave.) They overcome the situation's awkwardness and invite Andrew to a party later that night. He's got nothing better to do, and so commences the strange round of reconnections with friends, family, acquaintances and strangers. Andrew's medical history plays a pivotal role in the film. His father, a psychiatrist, has been prescribing Andrew drugs for emotional problems for 16 years. For some time now, Andrew has been getting sudden headaches, and while he's home he goes to a specialist to figure out what's wrong. Of course, while he's away from his medicine cabinet in L.A., Andrew finds his headaches improve. And he wonders whether or not the drugs are really helping...and why his father prescribed them in the first place. While he's at the doctor's, Andrew meets a local girl, Sam. They begin spending a lot of time together. Played by Natalie Portman, Sam is both innocently delightful and annoying. She's a self-admitted pathological liar, lives with her mother in a cloyingly pink house, and harbors her own medical history. She usually accompanies her stories with gems of advice like "You always have to laugh at yourself" and "Life is what it is." Amazingly enough, Ms. Portman manages to make these trite fancies into something more than just trite fancies - a tribute to the genuineness of the girl herself. In general, the script is sometimes clunky and the plot stretches into bizarre flights of fancy. A junkyard owner living at the bottom of a quarry turns out to embody wholesome family values. Sam's adopted brother serves to show that hard work really CAN make your dreams come true. And rather than adding anything to the movie, these tricks seem peripheral to both plot and character development. It's as if we are take them like pills, swallowing them with the rest of the drugs in the big cocktail that is Garden State. The movie is written and directed by its star, Zach Braff. Perhaps this explains the oftentimes wooden quality Zach's character, Andrew, has onscreen. Due to this impassiveness, Andrew seemed one-dimensional: a blank piece of paper that the other players write upon. It's unfortunate that the movie turns upon Andrew's emotional development: so much of the film is spent without Andrew evidencing any emotion at all that when he actually does try to show some passion, it just feels fake. Ultimately, Garden State is a mess of many different parts, none of which exactly line up into a finished product. The writing is spotty and though the cinematography is amazing, the editing is quite awful (hey, if I can catch choppy edits in the middle of scenes, then the film editor needs a day job). The performances of peripheral characters (Peter Sarsgaard as Mark, Ian Holm as Gideon) are quite good but can't quite cover for Zach's expressionless face. And though Natalie is cute, the total lack of chemistry between her and Zach make their relationship a wash. If you're into quirky movies about people in really strange and awkward situations, this might just float your boat. Otherwise, I'd just recommend another, better feel-good movie (say...Amelié?).