Movie Review

Camelot Pictures, starring: Zack Braff, (Andrew), Natalie Portman (Samantha), Ian Holm (Dr. Largeman), 97 minutes, 2004.

At their best, parables are unfinished stories without a specific moral point. So, imagine that after the party The Prodigal Son goes out to see some old buddies from schul and only plans to stay a couple of days. In Garden State (Paradise or New Jersey?) Andrew Largeman arrives home from The Far Country to attend his Mother's funeral. He meets a couple of old buddies who are working as gravediggers in the cemetery and parties with them that evening. "Large" has been living away for ten years working as an actor in Hollywood. He is very estranged from his father, who is a psychiatrist but who helpfully sets up an appointment with a neurologist in his office building when Andrew tells him that he has been experiencing intense flash headaches. In the waiting room he meets Sam, a wacky young woman who, it turns out, has epilepsy but who also lies a lot as a mechanism for coping with real life its own self. They form a cautious friendship (he's only home for a couple of days) that becomes a romance. This is a funny but dark story.

Andrew's mother had been a paraplegic who had drowned in her own bathtub. She became paraplegic when Andrew was 9 and in a fit of nine-year-old rage had pushed her backwards, unfortunately to fall over the open dishwasher door and hit her head on the counter top. His father had put him on a number of tranquilizers "to help him with his anger' and at age 12 had sent him to a boarding school. Andrew had not been home since, though he had continued with the medication, which had so calmed him down, that he had never shed a tear.

There are several poignant scenes in which there is wise reflection on family values. Once, as they are digging a grave in the pet cemetery in Sam's back yard Andrew talks about the point in life in which one realizes that the place you grew up in isn't really your home anymore. It is a kind of locker, a place where you store your stuff. The idea of home is gone and you're homesick for a place that doesn't exist even if the building is still there. "Maybe that's all that Family is, a group of people who all miss the same imaginary place".

In a scene reminiscent of the Parable of the Buried Treasure Andrew and Sam spend the precious hours of his last day in a chase around town with a friend who is going to give him a present. They end up with an odd environmentalist who lives in an ark in a city park "guarding an infinite abyss" from developers. On the side he sells antique jewelry, much of it supplied by grave digging/ robbing friends. His friend's gift is an antique necklace that belonged to Andrew's mother and was taken from her casket.

Andrew and his father have made an appointment to 'talk' and in a final scene with him Andrew asks what he wants.

"For us to forgive each other and be happy again". "Again?' asks Andrew, "When were we happy? I don't remember that. Maybe you could tell me; I could help steer us back. Or maybe we could work on being OK ….I need it to be OK with you for me to feel something again, even pain. This is my life. This is it. It's not too much to take on because it's everything that is. (pressing gently on his father's chest) You and I are going to be OK. Maybe not as happy as you always dreamed. Let's just allow ourselves to be whatever we are and that will be better. I think that will be better."

In the parable it says that the young man "came to himself" and went to his father's house. (Not the same thing as going home!) This movie is a romantic comedy about what might have happened the next day in the Prodigal's next conversation with his dad. Could they each let the other be whatever they are? Can we let God?