Zach Braff
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The Graduate (1967)
Directed by Mike Nichols
influenced Garden State (2004), A Good Person (2023)
Themes Music Visuals Plot
You either think Garden State is the second coming of The Graduate or find it to be grating to the Nth degree — there are no in-betweens with his 2004 dramedy.
Impressive writing-directing debut from TV's Zach Braff, a small, contemplative updating of "The Graduate", shows a good ear for thoughtful, observational humor and a gift for understated angst.
Braff has made no secret of the fact that he was influenced by such films as Harold & Maude and The Graduate (the use of Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack is a bit of a giveaway), but presumably, he also watched David Gordon Green’s movies and one would guess he’s seen Beautiful Girls (which also starred Natalie Portman) way too many more times than can be considered healthy.
The upstart director intuitively uses this particular brand of cinematic shorthand with a skill and economy that matches similar such visual flourishes from directors like Mike Nichols ("The Graduate") or Richard Linklater ("Waking Life").
The fact that the above synopsis applies equally well to 2004's Garden State and 1967's The Graduate forces us to ask just what relationship exists between the films.
While it appears to aspire to a sort of Harold & Maude balance, instead of mellifluous, Garden State really just feels like a car crash--the misbegotten child of The Graduate and The Exorcist .
It takes a good 30 minutes to pick up the kind of momentum needed to drive a depressing character like Largeman through the finish line, but once Portman pops up as the cheerful love interest (reminiscent of her earlier work in “Beautiful Girls”), the film glides to its conclusion.
Braff has made no secret of the fact that he was influenced by such films as Harold & Maude and The Graduate (the use of Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack is a bit of a giveaway), but presumably, he also watched David Gordon Green’s movies and one would guess he’s seen Beautiful Girls (which also starred Natalie Portman) way too many more times than can be considered healthy.
Depending on your view, Shaun of the Dead is either a zombie flick masking as a comedy, or a comedy masking as a zombie flick, or Beautiful Girls masking as a zombie comedy.
As director, Braff elicits the most charismatic Natalie Portman performance since "Beautiful Girls" and, visually makes the most of many sight-gags, including the inherent lunacy of working as a knight at Medieval Times.
Portman, freed from George Lucas' shackles and back in Beautiful Girls territory (but blessedly minus that earlier film's creepy pedophiliac vibe), simply glows in a role that could easily have crossed over into lethal levels of life-affirming perkiness.
Andrew gets a jolt out of sub-Springsteen territory when he meets Sam (Natalie Portman, in her most playful role since the similarly toned Beautiful Girls), a local girl ably coping with epilepsy.
Going in Style is a mix of the friendship chemistry in Ocean's Eleven and the morality behind the crime lesson in Hell or High Water (without the excessive violence).
While it might not be as entertaining as the likes of "Ocean's Eleven" in terms of heist complexity (although there is a post-robbery breakdown of how things played out and hey, these guys are seniors so let's cut them some slack) and Dillon isn't anywhere as fun or funny as Jeff Bridges was in "Hell or High Water," the film is entertaining enough for what it's trying to do and be.
It’s pretty obvious those involved with the production were somehow hoping for the success of something like Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 crime caper Ocean’s Eleven, itself a remake.
What begins as a somewhat promising mix between “Grumpy Old Men” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” however, quickly turns into a pedestrian, paint-by-numbers comedy that wallows in its own genericness.
There’s an element of moral justification to the geriatric crew’s position, and Braff tries to mine enough contemporary economic angst to get his audience on board, but it isn’t quite enough to put his crew in “Ocean’s Eleven” territory.
Before long, the three have whipped together a plan for hitting the bank that is so elaborate that the guys from “Ocean’s Eleven” might have suggested that they simplify.
And just like that, John goes full “Garden State.”
A gooey morass of indie-movie clichés, the wacky-family dramedy “The Hollars” marks yet another egregiously cutesy attempt to rekindle that “Garden State” magic.
From its first moments, when a grown son fights with his mother for morning bathroom time and finally resorts to an unsavory solution involving an orange juice pitcher and steady aim, “The Hollars” announces that it intends to be another “quirky” dysfunctional family dramedy in the tradition of the fine 2005 film “ Junebug ” and its far less gifted but more eager to please siblings, “ Garden State ” and “ Little Miss Sunshine .”
Written by Jim Strouse, Kaminski’s sophomore directorial project (after “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men”) is a “Garden State”-like indie — neurotic characters coming together around an illness or a death, with the journey of a back-in-town denizen providing dramatic thrust.
Garden State, meet Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
With a wind of lightly plucked guitars and melancholic folk melodies at its back, The Hollars delivers small-town family drama in the familiar Sundance-indie mode that’s remained ubiquitous since films like Garden State (2004), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and the like rose to prominence.
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
influenced by Garden State (2004)
Themes Plot Music
Zach Braff’s Garden State may be the closest analog—both explicitly reference The Graduate, that touchstone of generational uncertainty—but (500) Days Of Summer is more thoughtful, and thus more maddening in its shortcomings.
It’s too soon to tell whether (500) Days of Summer will emerge as an Annie Hall or The Graduate for this generation — or at least supplant Garden State insofar as being the movie of choice for lovelorn folks trying to make some sense out of their lives.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are both superb in their roles, and in its mixture of emotion and quirk, the movie has a nice Garden State-y feel to it.
(500) Days has pretensions to being the anti- Garden State —a movie where the quirky dream girl doesn’t so much save the hero as make him stumble and accidentally fall forward.
The conclusion does reclaim some of the film’s early spunk, and that springboard may be all film-festival audiences need to declare to their friends that they were among the first to see the next Garden State or Juno.
It’s a Shins-in-Garden State moment, all but breaking the fourth wall to invite the audience to feel an affinity (whether cultural or, less charitably, demographic) with the movie.
Happythankyoumoreplease (2011)
Directed by Josh Radnor
influenced by Garden State (2004)
Plot Themes
“Happythankyoumoreplease” is less mopey and downbeat than TV star Zach Braff’s “Garden State.”
But HappyThankYouMorePlease has a different vibe than Garden State or HIMYM.
So the fact that Radnor has written, directed and stars in his very own Garden State with the cutesy title Happythankyoumoreplease, in which he plays Sam Wexler, a struggling novelist who hearts New York, loves being in love and yes, gloms onto life's little coincidences - in this case, a boy (Michael Algieri) he runs into on the subway and decides he needs to help - tells you too much already.
Radnor, the star of TV’s “How I Met Your Mother,” wrote and directed this romantic comedy, which has the feel but not the quirks of films such as “(500) Days of Summer” and “Garden State”: tales of clueless guys trying to get in touch with their own flaws so that they might actually be right for the woman they’re drawn to.
While it may not be the next Garden State, Happythankyoumoreplease is a refreshing and witty romantic comedy that despite not doing anything terribly new or inspired, hits all the right notes and comes together to make a very worthy directorial debut for Mr. Radnor.
Though Happythankyoumoreplease is bound to be compared to so-called slacker films like Garden State and Reality Bites, the fact remains that, in a cinematic world in love with man-children who refuse to grow up, here at least are young adults who, though they may go kicking and screaming, at least acknowledge the necessity of the transition.
BOTTOM LINE “Garden State” meets “Godzilla” in this highly original indie-kaiju comedy.
It’s as if Garden State (2004) became a special effects movie.
With a few trims the film could be entirely different and blandly realistic — messed-up protagonist returns to hometown for a bittersweet spiritual cleanse; we've seen a few indies along those lines, for sure, even if you don't include "Garden State."
That sounds like one sort of picture, yet another dour variation on the “Garden State”/ “Return of the Secaucus Seven” nostalgia model.
Braff certainly shows promise, and I have to give him credit for placing himself squarely in the path of comparison to some of the greatest dark comedies of the past 30 years by consciously referencing "Harold and Maude", "The Graduate", and the more recent films of Wes Anderson.
(I talked to Braff over the phone about his influences and he mentioned the usual suspects such as Harold and Maude and Annie Hall, but also, surprisingly, Todd Haynes' masterfully creepy Safe, which settles onto the unwary viewer like a bad rash.)
"Scrubs" star Zach Braff returns to the perennial theme of going home again with "Garden State," his directorial debut, in which he pays homage to such classics as "The Graduate" and "Harold and Maude."
It takes just one of Hal Ashby’s frames to see that Harold and Maude has set an oddly liberated and dreamily realistic atmosphere for so many brilliant filmmakers and films to come – from Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, to gems like Garden State and Submarine.
If Zach Braff’s “Garden State” no longer feels like the generational alarm clock it did in 2004, that’s because “Elizabethtown” and “The Last Kiss” (also with Braff) made it easier to hit snooze on poor-me whines of twentysomething males in quarter-life crises.
The plot might remind viewers of last year's indie hit "Garden State," but Crowe is aiming at a mainstream audience, which makes his challenge that much greater.
Reviews of Elizabethtown will begin in one of two ways: The reviewer will compare Cameron Crowe's latest to the bizarrely similar Garden State, or she'll quip on the opening voiceover by Orlando Bloom, a rumination on the difference between "failure" and a "fiasco."
If it sounds familiar, it should: Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown is, for all intents and purposes, Garden State 2. But where the delightful Garden State showed that its auteur, Zach Braff, is a disciple of pillowy pop-music patchworks like Say Anything and Jerry Maguire, Crowe's cloying Elizabethtown little more than a phoned-in date movie makes it clear the pupil has outshone his professor.
No matter how you look at it, the story line is a Hollywoodized rip-off of Zach Braff's vastly superior Garden State.
This Is Where I Leave You (2014)
Directed by Shawn Levy
influenced by Garden State (2004)
Characters Themes Plot
Fey has screen time, but not much development to her storyline: Penny (Rose Byrne), an ice-skater who had a high-school crush on Judd, comes across as a weirdly familiar echo of enabling young women in funeral movies, such as Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State.
I can rattle off a list off the top of my head from the last decade or so: Garden State, Margot at the Wedding, Rachel Getting Married, Elizabethtown, A Christmas Tale, August: Osage County, The Royal Tenenbaums (lots of Wes Anderson’s work, actually).
In many ways, it’s Garden State, Parenthood, and Home for the Holidays with a splash of The Big Chill.
Many films in the last few years from Garden State, Death at a Funeral, August: Osage County to the recently released The Judge, have used a variation of this increasingly derivative premise.
The film’s blue-and-orange colour palette is more of a reference to 1960s interior and industrial design — compare it to Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) – than an instance of the aggressive teal-and-orange colour grading favoured by blockbuster films.
Going in Style is a mix of the friendship chemistry in Ocean's Eleven and the morality behind the crime lesson in Hell or High Water (without the excessive violence).
In a more serious vein, the recent Oscar-nominated Hell Or High Water dealt with the effect of the banks taking over the little guy, and now this film seems equally well-timed to make an impact — albeit one that uses broad comedy in spots to drive its points home.
Continually patronized, underestimated or plainly ignored, Joe, Willie and Albert resemble the heroes of last year’s similarly themed “Hell or High Water” as they seek retribution for their financial woes and social insignificance.
Despite invoking today’s capitalist bogeymen of callous corporations and exploitative banks, Going in Style shrinks from class conflict of the sort that has animated heist films including David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water , Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share and even Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist .
Have them decide to rob their own bank for revenge and ride into the sunset for a senior citizen Hell or High Water.
Interestingly enough, it has just as much in common with last year's superlative "Hell or High Water."
When your movie not only holds up Good Will Hunting as an honored inspiration but makes the Damon-Driver romance seem like Brief Encounter by comparison, it's not a bad time to call someone with some actual experience in directing.
In 2004, the lead actor from a silly sitcom (Zach Braff of "Scrubs"), with no other notable credits to his name, wrote and directed an independent movie, "Garden State."
It's not easy to be the alternative dream girl in an American film but, like Natalie Portman in Zach Braff's Garden State, Olsen invests her character with both a charm and a sense of uncluttered perception that makes difficult scenes take flight.
If this sounds a lot like Garden State, well, it is, only with one person mourning a career instead of several people mourning a person, and a classical mixtape (how high-minded Zibby is!) taking the place of The Shins.
Playing a burnout gravedigger, Peter Sarsgaard ( Shattered Glass , Boys Dont Cry ) proves once again that he may just be one of the most versatile and understated actors working today.
Mark would probably have been a nothing role without Sarsgaard (so good in Shattered Glass).
Certainly he seems that way to the admiring Mark (Peter Sarsgaard of “Shattered Glass”), a gravedigger whose propensities for pot, partying and low-level larceny slowly pull his reluctant pal into a variety of adventures.
At his mother's funeral, he meets old friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard, "Shattered Glass") seated beside the earth mover that has dug the grave.
Braff has a nebbishy Everyman quality that suits the part of Large, while Sarsgaard (who turned heads as the conscientious editor in Shattered Glass) contributes an edge of brittle hostility to his character, enough so that at any given moment he seems equally capable of hugging or slugging Large.
And Sarsgaard -- who won the San Francisco Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor for Shattered Glass (2003) -- does one of his lovely slow reveals, in which he first appears to be a shallow, selfish twerp, but eventually uncovers a big heart and a clear personality.
Critic Nathan Rabin coined that phrase to refer to film characters such as Natalie Portman's in Garden State, who use their magical quirkiness to convince a depressed male protagonist that life is worth living.
The Only Living Boy in New York (2017)
Directed by Marc Webb
influenced by Garden State (2004)
Themes Music
A dumb movie being marketed toward smart people,The Only Living Boy in New York isn’t Manhattan; it’s not even Garden State.
“The Only Living Boy in New York” isn’t, at this point, a great title for a movie, since the incandescent Simon & Garfunkel song it’s taken from was already used — defined — in the movies by the most memorable scene in Zach Braff’s “Garden State.”
Braff uses split screens for phone conversations and planning montages — a technique that Norman Jewison famously deployed in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
The upstart director intuitively uses this particular brand of cinematic shorthand with a skill and economy that matches similar such visual flourishes from directors like Mike Nichols ("The Graduate") or Richard Linklater ("Waking Life").
In this respect, Garden State makes Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) look like a cavalcade of success stories.