20 Years Later, Garden State Is a Lexicon of New Jersey Failure

In productions about New Jersey, from The Sopranos to Clerks, the idea of passing time is romanticized as a grand thing of quiet beauty, often shot in an elegant if obvious way to suggest a depth of dignity in simplistic life that doesn’t exist. Garden State is perhaps the only New Jersey film to turn the lack of options to succeed into something frightening and sadly hedonistic. 

The first taste we get of this is when Zach Braff’s Andrew Largeman, a struggling actor in L.A. who fled home nine years ago, decides to ride his motorbike over to a party. He’s pulled over by a police officer who turns out to be a former cokehead high school classmate who explains that he became a cop because he needed to figure out something to do other than work at a shop. While he prattles on about how great Robert DeNiro is in an attempt to connect, Andrew waits for the interaction to be done so he can get back to his life. 

In the next scene, Andrew is surrounded by townies who have nothing better to say than movie titles and famous lines from them as they identify him as someone who left to pursue his dream, and is therefore above the commoners of New Jersey. Unsavvy and basic, they have no idea how to engage Andrew in a meaningful discussion of his experience in L.A. One former classmate says he sold his patent for a lot of money, and is now doing nothing, having already perhaps peaked at 26, unaware of how Andrew is feeling about his own life in a landscape where media and actors seem to have different ideas about their talent and value. He goes downstairs. Bored and hoping to not be disengaged while everyone pops pills to feel alive, Andrew takes something and still feels removed from everyone living in the moment. Even when someone kisses him, he’s out of reach mentally and emotionally, untethered from the desperation of everyone else. 

From here, Braff unfurls two different characters as focal points for his feelings on the ways in which youth can find ways to survive amidst the pressures of adulthood. The first is Andrew’s closest friend from childhood, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard). Andrew interacts with him and observes him at the breakfast table with his mom (Jean Smart), and Tim (Jim Parsons), a classmate who now works as a knight at Medieval Times. While his mom tries to talk Tim up, Mark just tears him down, not because he dislikes Tim, but because Tim reminds him of himself—someone burning their 20s in a state of anti-gravity, going nowhere. Mark positions himself as an adult in every scene he’s in, trying to fake being fully independent and savvy, even as he talks to his friends in his childhood bedroom, banking on old trading cards from a toy line to make him rich and let him escape. In one scene, this is clarified as a kind of arrested development, with Mark’s mother suggesting that Mark gets involved in a real-estate opportunity she is interested in. Mark parries her remarks, asking why she’s rushing him when he’s “only 26.”

Arrested development is an issue of interest to Braff, as his love interest, Natalie Portman’s Sam, is a former ice skater who works a paralegal-ish job despite having seizures and lives at home. In every scene Sam is in, she is cute, fun, and spontaneous in a way no one else is. It’s important to mention that Sam is also a figure of pop cultural note, since she is a character Nathan Rabin would categorize as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,  an archetype for women that has them function as quirky oddballs whose idiosyncrasies somehow save or make smitten sad young men. However, while this might be appropriate for similar characters from other movies of the time, Braff clearly intends Sam to be an interesting woman trying to combat the despair of New Jersey via quirks like lying to make herself seem more interesting.

From here, Braff opts to have Andrew, Mark, and Sam tour the weirdness of the state in an effort to procure a gift for Andrew before he returns to L.A. The film moves from endless rows of two-story houses to more overtly bleak spaces, starting with a local general retailer where employees pester customers to get involved in pyramid schemes. The viewer is then transported to a hotel that Mark moves through as if it’s nothing, ending up in a crawl space-esque hallway where men have gathered to watch couples have sex through holes drilled into the walls. In both worlds, Mark is telegraphed as someone sad and bored, but who has leveraged these things in a way that allows him to feel cool and in the know about what makes the state depressing in unique ways. However, in the hall, his interest in watching intimacy suggests a loneliness stemming from all he’s ignoring in his own life.

After peering into the seedy underbelly of suburban boredom, Mark brings Andrew and Sam to a canyon. After descending into it, the film introduces the only two happy people in the entire film: a couple with a baby living on a refurbished boat who are happy purely because they are removed from the engulfing mouth of sameness above them. At one point, with a gleam in his eye, the husband says at night he explores the abyss’s unknown, suggesting that his happiness comes from the option to get even further away from townies than he is now. 

The film ends with Andrew and Sam at the airport. Once he’s boarded, he opts to stay in state with Sam, despite what he knows about New Jersey. Unsure of how to survive but desperate to do so, the film ends with Andrew asking “What do we do?” Sam, having no idea, kisses him to say that even if New Jersey is miserable, the two of them help one another feel alive, and they will figure out how to keep each other going through the darkness.