Garden State...and other sad excuses for the state of Indy Filmaking

To be honest, I’m starting to get sick of people parading to the Drexel expressing with their Entertainment Weekly connoisseur mentality that Independent films are better: “They’re from the heart…they deal with real life…a heartbreaking tale of two misfits…so un-hollywood.” These catchphrases have crept into our rhetoric of critique partially thanks to all the crappy critics that review films on CNN, Netscape and the Today show. It’s a crazy world when we are marketing rebellion and saying to people, “Hey this is soooo un-conventional…buy it!” Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there was a time when rebellion meant against all convention at all cost? When it was a Marxist struggle between the little people and the head honchos in white collars? I mean, when you hear that Ashlee Simpson and Avril Lavigne are the rebellious spokespersons for Generation Y (or whatever rebellious, outcast-ish name corporations will label a group of people), you know something’s got to be wrong. Alas this mindstate has polluted our youth culture to what I find is an unhealthy state and has even manifested itself into independent filmmaking.

Kudos must be given to corporations who got smart when their crappy Hollywood product stopped taking in profit except for the few action packed blockbusters and decided to cash in on the rebellious nature of western culture. They first start re-releasing films with “Director’s Cuts” (and there might even be a documentary on how the director’s vision was destroyed by the studio, this being the definitive version, and thus making us shell out more cash to experience the “definitive vision”). Then they make films, which pertain to many critics vocabulary as “arty” or “independent” solely because there are no action scenes and little – if no – CGI used. Garden State for me was an example where corporations are shoving made-to-order entertainment down our throats and passing it as art.

Because I am a pessimistic bastard with no heart, let me rant on what pisses me off about this film first. As I mentioned above, Garden State is really no different from other films which talk about an outsider with a dark past who comes back home and works out a decade/lifetime of problems in a few hours thanks to that outcast female character who teaches him that life isn’t superficial and worthless. How sweet. Too bad I’ve already seen this in Buffalo 66, Raising Victor Vargas, Rocky and about half the films they show on the IFC channel.
The one thing that drives cinema storytelling today is sentimentality. Since the days of D.W. Griffith, film has been stuck in this vaudeville rut of trying to make its audience feel. You can’t read a review of a film without them saying, “I laughed, I cried” or even worse, “it just hit me” We’ve been so conditioned to feel at the movies that no one ever attempts to think about the films they watch. For instance, has anyone counted the amount of subtle pirate references in a film as simple as The Goonies? (look at the couch in Brad’s living room, look at the old men taking a shower in the country club). Not a lot of people do because they’re too busy enjoying the film on a purely emotional basis. Now I’m not saying that this is a bad thing but when intelligent, cerebral films by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Jan Svankmajer or David Lynch (except those annoying Hot Topic teenager who say, “Wow, his films are weird and wonderful…that’s how I feel in my soul.”) are watched and all people say is, “They’re boring”, “Pretentious” or “I don’t understand it.” To get to my point, it’s films like Garden State that give independent/art films a bad name. The teenage art crowd just laps it up like dogs and go on to make crappy student films in film school.

While the storyline is cliché at its best, the direction a regurgitated Wes Anderson clone and its emotions as real as the Trix bunny, I’ll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and try to examine it for what it is. First of all…I’m not going to give a stupid ass synopsis that precedes every film review in existence. If you can’t tell what the film’s about just by looking at the trailer, get your head fixed. If you want more detail about the film: go fucking watch it. I’m not here to tell you what happens.

In a nutshell, there were some camera shots that were clever and pretty. I thought the ego-maniac that is the star/director did a nice job sitting on a couch looking emotionless. The actors who played his friends were good and (here comes a cool catch phrase!) believable in their roles. Natalie Portman, however, is a bad actor. The Professional aside (and this is just because she was a child in that film, and child actors are mostly always annoyingly bad actors, so I try not to expect too much from them), I have never enjoyed her flat, cue-card-reading voice acting abilities. Her whole, “creating a unique moment in history” speech and following cat-meowing/striptease like dance was equally flat and (catch phrase!) unbelievable. The whole reconciliation with the father sequence sped by like a lightening bolt, and I was thinking to myself, “Man if I were going to have a heart to heart with my father it wouldn’t simply consist of me walking into his bedroom, grabbing his chest, and going, ‘I forgive you.’” But hey, I’m sure ego-maniac boy, being such a great director, understands how to successfully build up his movie to his confrontation with his father - only for it to become an exchange of 5 sentences. Or maybe yet, he wanted to close set that day so he could practice his kissing scenes with Natalie Portman.

In all, I hope ego-maniac boy will have a fruitful career in the movies, making lots of money and doing what he loves. But I also hope for everyone’s sake, that all the dumb people in the world will grow a brain and stop feeling and start thinking for a change.