Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I honestly have no idea what this movie is. I think this movie fixed in my mind that New Jersey is called the Garden State, and it stars Zach Braff apparently trying to do something more serious than Scrubs. I seem to recall that it might be a road movie?

Beyond that, the only thing I associate with this movie is that it keeps coming up as an underappreciated failure that millennials love.

After watching the movie:

Stalled-out actor and apathetic waiter Andrew Largeman wakes up to an answering machine message from his estranged father, telling him that his paraplegic mother has drowned in the bathtub and for the first time in nine years, he’ll have to leave Los Angeles and come home to New Jersey for the funeral. Andrew and his father barely talk, but Andrew describes getting thunderclap headaches to his psychiatrist father, who gets him an appointment at with a neurologist colleague. At the funeral, Andrew realizes the gravediggers are his old friends Mark and Dave, who are going to a party that night and invite him along. At the party, Andrew partakes of the drugs his friends are sharing, but still feels disconnected at best while there. In the neurologist’s office the next day, he meets a girl named Sam and quickly learns she’s a pathological liar. The neurologist asks Andrew how long he’s been on the cocktail of powerful mood stabilizers he has, and Andrew reveals his father put him on them at age 10 to curb the anger issues his father thinks Andrew has. After their appointments, Andrew asks Sam if she can accompany him to his friend Jesse’s house so taking her home can be his excuse to leave quickly, and then she invites him in her house to meet her family, where she explains to him her need to never be too ordinary. Andrew promises his father they’ll talk on his last day before going home, and then Mark takes him (and Sam) out on an all-day fetch quest getting the things Mark needs to be able to obtain the birthday/going away present he wants to give Andrew.

While this movie takes plenty of time to explore the themes of coming home and realizing it’s not home anymore and of going off the beaten path to get the most out of life, I don’t really feel like it had that much to actually say. I thought Andrew’s disconnection with his life was a reflection of a widespread experience of depressed young people, but it turns out it’s mostly from being in a beige pharmaceutical haze, and the home Andrew is nostalgic for died at age ten.

Some of the best sequences are when it doesn’t feel like it remembered to have a plot. It’s so focused on the little human moments of connection that when it’s just doing that, it works, but when there’s a hint of a throughline, any distraction from getting where we’re going feels like just that, a distraction.

I guess if you connect with the music of the movie you’re more likely to connect with the movie. To me, it’s just a lot of possibly mostly indie artists from the early 00s, and sometimes kind of incongruous. Writer director Zach Braff just put whatever he was listening to a lot in the movie, and it feels more like a mixtape than a song score.

I wish I felt like this movie was for me. I came close to identifying with Andrew for a moment but mostly I was just waiting for the point, and then by the time I decided the point was that there wasn’t a point, it had to find a point so it could wrap up. I think I can see what other people love about this, but I don’t connect to it in the way that they do, and if I was ever going to, I think that moment has passed.