by mantunes

These trips brought a newfound freedom to me. Not just the physical freedom from the confines of my home in Newark—which boarding school had largely provided me—but a softer kind of freedom, the one that comes from being able to do whatever you want. Outside of these trips, movie viewing was usually a negotiation between my brother and my aunt. Most arthouse and independent films were off the table, especially if a big budget blockbuster and a buzzy rom-com was on the marquee. With the $8 or so dollars I had in my hand, I could pretty much see anything I wanted, even R-rated flicks as most of the attendants were barely conscious at best and not checking for age. A new door had been opened.

On my way out of a film I still can’t remember, I spotted a poster second on the right near the entrance to the lobby that instantly drew my eye.

I . . . am thinking it’s a sign/That the freckles in our eyes 

Are mirror images/And when we kiss, they’re perfectly aligned

Such Great Heights, Iron and Wine

The poster forced me to look at it. What film would have the gall to use our state’s great moniker as its film title? How could it possibly claim to represent an entire state? Questions like that drove my thinking for a few minutes. 

Describing the poster without showing it is difficult. Three people wearing black garbage bags stand atop the graffitied skeleton of a construction machine, screaming at something towards the lower left of the poster. Three laurels from festivals underscore the red-lettered title against a white background. In case it was unclear to the residents of the other 49 states of this country, the word NEW JERSEY is embossed on the construction equipment. 

The poster is now a bona fide piece of mid-2000s ephemera, of a time between 9/11 and the Great Recession where an undercurrent of fear pervaded most aspects of life (traveling, school, foreign politics) but the full blown apathy and mistrust that would come to define the last decade and a half hadn’t really kicked in. Optimism, though waning, still had some purchase. The poster was a startling piece of art, one that threw me back and pulled me in. I was so entranced by this poster that a year later I purchased a copy. The poster dominanted my dorm room wall throughout the rest of high school and all of college, to the point that the annual tearing down and putting it back up with fun-tack  made the poster so crimped and worn that it now just sits in my parents’ attic along with several rolled up posters of movie and art I’d rather forget about. It was my coat-of-arms, a quick way to signal my Jerseyness to my friends from elsewhere, something that became a bit of a crutch for me.

I probably spent a full five minutes—an eternity for a movie theater lobby where no one really congregated—trying to decipher this poster. I didn’t recognize any of the actors, save for Natalie Portman who I solely knew from the Star Wars series and a probably ill-advised showing of Leon: The Professional by a college-aged neighbor to an 11-year-old me. I thought the poster would have some clues to the plot of the movie. Was it a romp through my home state? Perhaps a satire about the generally dumpiness that most people think of when they utter the words “New Jersey”? The harder I stared, the more fanciful my thoughts became and the less sure I was of any answer.

Do you believe 

In what you see?

In the Waiting Line, Zero 7

The answer took 2 minutes and 19 seconds. Well, not really an answer, but an invitation to ask more questions. The trailer came on before a movie I’ve been wrecking myself to remember. I’ve narrowed down the list to these contenders that I saw in the theater in the first half of 2004: Spider-Man 2; The Ladykillers; Troy; Van Helsing; Shrek 2; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Dodgeball; The Terminal; or Fahrenheit 9/11. (If you happened to be with me seeing one of these movies and distinctly remember my reaction to the trailer, please reach out.)

This was the age of pre-YouTube, when video sharing was more hassle than it was worth. If you wanted to see a trailer (and not just a short teaser on television), you had to arrive early to a movie and hope that you would catch it as one of the select few shone—the slew of trailers before the beginning of a movie occupied much less time then than they do now.

So what if you catch me

Where would we land?

Fair, Remy Zero

Is this supposed to be a funny movie? Or is it serious? I was not yet fully versed in the cinematic language of the low-budget indie rom-com/dramedy, but even with twenty years of hindsight, this is a trailer for a movie that could really go either way. The number of comedic set pieces in the trailer alone borders on the level of farce.

Also, I did not understand where the Jersey of this fell. The people in the trailer were not the Jersey folks I grew up with, a distinct lack of people-of-color or any urban environs. Maybe the name was a mistake? Could Garden State refer to something else aside from New Jersey?

Again, I would just have to wait for the wide release of the film. But I was excited for a film in a way that I had not been before. I mean, I was such a Star Wars fanboy that I had experienced the thrill of the wait—basically, my entire 1999. But this was different. There was so much unknown. I also felt like such an adult. This wasn’t that kind of movie.

A half a million thoughts

Are flowing through my mind

Lebanese Blonde, Thievery Corporation

Emerging from the darkness of the theater, I was stunned. I mean literally stunned, not stunned from amazement. More like bewildered. I could not muster the words to describe how I felt. Movies before this one told me who I should root for and how I should feel. This one didn’t even have a real ending. Before seeing Garden State, I watched movies solely for plot. The plot of this one seemed to be besides the point. 

I was too young for this movie, but also exactly the right age. I was at an age for this movie to stick with me for the rest of my life. I am of the firm belief that the popular culture you consume between the ages of 10 and 16 will become the yardstick by which you compare everything else you consume thereafter. You wouldn’t argue that these particular pieces are the greatest or even relatively good. But they are yours.

Had Garden State come out just four years earlier or four years late, I don’t think it would play this outsized role in my life. But, because I saw it at fourteen, it became the genesis point of my movie-going existence. I started to search out for more of these kinds of indie films. Gone were the epics, the Oscar-bait, the schlocky comedies. In were the quirky, introspective, director-screenwriter flicks, the kind that you could only find at the Clairidge in Montclair. No longer would my trips to the theater overlap with what my friends from home were watching. Instead, the snobby retort “What? You haven’t seen [insert horribly obscure film that only saw a month release]?”came to dominate my conversations.

And we all live in a beautiful world

Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do.

Don’t Panic, Coldplay

Andrew Largemen sounds exactly like the name you would give a nondescript, twentysomething, suburban, Jewish character. “Large” is far from an everyman. He’s an actor; his family is of some means; he has unfettered access to a bewildering array of prescription medication. However, with an incredible amount of life experience and clearly not enough, 14-year old me could not resist finding common cause with this deeply flawed protagonist, and it is pretty clear that the point of the film is to get you to identify with Large.

Large and I had everything and nothing in common. We were both from Jersey; however, he was from either South Orange or Maplewood given the Columbia High reference, and I am from Newark. We both went to boarding school; I went four the full four years and by choice, and he was shipped by his father for the last two years of high school. He is perpetually medicated or drugged, whereas I, aside from alcohol, have lived a pretty straight-edged existence. His father is a psychiatrist; my parents are working class. 

What got me—and I am sure many of the viewers who enjoyed the movie did as well—was the complete feeling of isolation from family and the circle of friends. This is where I think Large has some bigger purchase as a character. Large spends nearly the entire film failing to connect with people on an interpersonal level, whether it’s the customers in the Vietnamese restaurant, his own father, the amorphous circle of friends from growing up, or even Sam in the beginning part of their relationship. This could be chalked up to his catatonic state, which I can imagine is pretty off-putting for most people and probably inserts more barriers in his life than it takes down.

But, Large is also presented by a world that refuses to meet him on his level, and I think we can all relate to that. Despite not outwardly showing it, Large is grieving the loss of his mother and not at all relieved by it—as most people are suspecting he is. All the world can offer him are the usual platitudes and then the immediate direction to move on, something Large is clearly not ready for. This is why he gravitates so easily to Sam. It’s not her joy for life or her ability to live in the moment. It’s actually her ability to bring a sense of genuine emotion to everything, even the death of a pet that she would even admit is pretty ridiculous.

That’s where the film clicks. We are all searching for someone who doesn’t necessarily understand us completely but will bring that counterpoint to the rest of the world. They do the opposite of what the rest of the world is doing, and that may be what we need.

And I still don’t know where it goes

Winding Road, Bonnie Sommerville

Wait! They make “I ♡ Newark” shirts?!?

You don’t know the greatness that you are

Blue Eyes, Cary Brothers

Is this a Jersey movie? Is it the Jersey movie? 

This is kind of like the Great American Novel question; it’s a totally silly exercise on paper but so central to our understanding of our own culture. For the Great American Novel, it’s our relationship to European literature. For New Jersey, it’s our relationship to the cultural hegemon of New York and the unique Philly/Pennsylvania identity. 

Jersey, no doubt, has a distinct identity. This is the land of Springsteen, of the Sopranos, of the Meadowlands, the Shore, and the Pine Barrens, of the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. The culture is so amorphous that should you not namecheck the state or one of its hundreds of municipalities, you might walk away without realizing the state is the backdrop to the film. We don’t have a distinct accent, a distinct look, or even an easily noticeable way of going about life. There’s Minnesota nice; there’s “everything’s bigger in Texas,” there’s the broody rain of Seattle and Washington State. New Jersey is just <shrug>.

This is why it’s exceptionally hard to make a Jersey movie. The worst are broad stroke comedies that take place here and over-index on the stereotypes of Italian Americans, one of the largest ethnic groups in the state and the one that has become a stand-in (almost wrongly so) for the entire state. The best, on the other hand, are often too subtle that the Jerseyness sits so far in the background that it ends up being meaningless. Using the Wikipedia page of “List of films set in New Jersey,” the best candidates where Jersey has some palpable presence in the film are: Clerks (and the entire Kevin Smith filmography); Being John Malkovich; Chasing Amy; Many Saints of Newark; Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle; Goodbye, Columbus; Jersey Boys; Jersey Girl (bleh!); Lean on Me; On the Waterfront; Paterson; Paul Blart: Mall Cop; and The Wedding Singer. 

Garden State stands above these all because I think it gets two things about the state spot on. First, New Jersey—for better or for worse—is a heavily suburbanized state, and this movie is a clever exploration of those themes. Suburbs are liminal spaces. They have many of the amenities which for most of human existence were associated with cities—dense populations, infrastructure, etc.—but are spaced out and isolated like the countryside. This plays well with Large’s own liminal existence. Second, New Jersey is a net exporter of people within this country. Large, like many others, left New Jersey, not for economic opportunity per se but to escape the state and pursue some (perhaps meaningless) dream, like becoming an actor. There is something about this state that both repulses its natives and impels them. I am a victim of this, and I don’t know why.

I also want to note that turning the city that is Newark into a bottomless pit that White people scream into may be the most Jersey thing I have ever seen committed to film.

I still find pieces of your presence here

Even after all these years

I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,  Colin Hay

Let’s just talk about the soundtrack. Actually, let’s call it an album, which is frankly what it is. It’s often described as the greatest thing related to this movie and for good reason. The music won a Grammy for best compilation album for a film, an otherwise forgettable category. It has sold over a million copies and is listed as Platinum by the RIAA. It singlehandly made the careers of at least five of the bands on its track listing.

It’s kind of hard to explain what makes this album so special. It seems like it’s no different than any other compilation album. If you had said it was a mix tape put together by a college sophomore, I would have believed you. Every song is tinged with some level of emotion: angst, wonder, despair, joy, melancholy, apathy. None of the songs sit in the background; each offers a thesis on the state of the world which demands to be heard, which is exactly what a college sophomore would do to you in person.

Normally, such weight for each song would doom an album. It’s why greatest hits or “best of” albums don’t work as concept albums. (ABBA Gold being, in my opinion, a notable exception.) Nothing is more tiring than for every song to have meaning. You need a rest, an interlude, a divergence, on an album to give it some contrast and gradation. Sgt. Pepper’s has Fixing a Hole. Nevermind has Territorial Pissings. 

Garden State somehow escapes this trap. I can’t fully explain why, but I think it has to do with the fact that it is so closely associated with a single film and a single moment in the larger cultural zeitgeist. Garden State came out a few years before peak millennial hispterdom, before (as Robert Lanham so cleverly put it) they “shun[ned] or reduc[ed] to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream” just for the sake of doing so. You could love this album for what it was without having to explain so or without having to justify it. You didn’t have to prove that only you and a handful of people listened to this album. Everyone below the age of 35 had this album. My aunt and uncle had it! And, if you saw the movie, each of the songs hit a double emotional resonance with particular scenes that paired so well with the song selected for it. Listening to the album could substitute for rewatching the film—and for some people, it could be an even more transporting experience. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask from an album.

I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock

One of These Things First, Nick Drake

“Of course,  I’ve heard and respect the criticism, but . . . I was a very depressed young man who had this fantasy of a dream girl coming along and saving me from myself.” Zack Braff in a 2023 interview with People Magazine

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

The Only Living Boy in New York,  Simon & Garfunkel

I regretted the answer as soon as I said it. 

“What is your favorite movie?” 

“Garden State.”

I was alone in the passenger seat of what probably was a Beamer careening down the Eisenhower Parkway between Roseland and Livingston. The driver was the senior partner of the law firm where I had my summer associateship and who was supposed to be my mentor for the length of the gig. He took a curious but somewhat distant interest in me. I came well-credentialed, and I had a feeling he collected people like me. It didn’t help that he was transactional, and I had already expressed my desire to jump over into litigation. “Why would any sane lawyer want to run away from where the money and action is?,” he almost certainly thought.

He asked me the question because he had deep contacts in the film industry and had even produced a few himself, enough to name-drop and give him credibility in the field. At some point during the ride, I probably called myself a film buff, which inevitably led to the question.

Nearly ten years and 56 Criterion blu-rays later (as well as charter membership to the streaming channel of the same), I would have aced this test. I could have gone with the pretentious but truthful answer, In the Mood for Love, a delight of late 90s Cantonese cinema that is strikingly beautiful and whose script could fit on a legal pad. I could have gone with something more ecumenical like Blade Runner, with its lingering wide-pan shots that accentuate the themes of loneliness and existentialism. I could have mused over the late Golden Era classics like Vertigo or Sunset Boulevard and how they are actually meta-commentary on the industry itself. Had I been feeling especially edgy and obtuse, I could have picked something from the Dogma ‘95 era like The Celebration (Festen) or an inscrutable Werner Fassbender film from the 1970s.

Instead, I gave a dumb but honest answer. The movie was a decade old, and nothing—neither music nor visual media nor fashion—is well-received at the ten-year-mark after it has come out. It’s too old to be fresh, and too new to have the level of distance that allows it to be fresh again. Garden State, a darling when it came out, started to recede from cultural memory, subsumed by the indie films that drew inspiration from it and outshone it. However, it still was my yardstick, my point of reference for every mid- to low-budget film that I saw.

He tried to hide his hostile reaction to my choice but a good amount of his disbelief came through in his response. He hadn’t tried to persuade me with another film during the ride. That wasn’t the point. My answer was his attempt to size me up, and I was found wanting.

I have since stopped practicing law. 

It’s a luscious mix of words and tricks

Caring is Creepy, The Shins

“A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film’s dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.” Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe

“[A]rtificial and forced.” Bill Muller, The Arizona Republic

“[A] good start, though not a great one; let’s check back in with him in a couple of years.” Moira MacDonald, The Seattle Times

“[E]verything from falling in love to blowing up asteroids . . . .” Phoebe Flowers, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Not subtle.” Geoff Andrew, TimeOut

“Braff’s thesping is OK, his directing a bit better than that, but the writing leaves a good deal to be desired.” Todd McCarthy, Variety 

“[S]teals shamelessly from The Graduate . . . .” Peter Howell, Toronto Star

“This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it’s smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail, as when Andrew arrives at work in Los Angeles and notices that the spigot from a gas pump, ripped from its hose when he drove away from a gas station, is still stuck in his gas tank. Something like that tells you a lot about a person’s state of mind.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

Well, I’ve danced like the queen of the eyesores . . . .

New Slang, The Shins

Natalie Portman. The face that launched a thousand thinkpieces. The original Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The term saw its first utterance in a review of the film Elizabethtown in 2007. Nathan Rabin, writing for A.V. Club, laid out the trope starkly, explaining: 

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl [MPDG] exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family. 

With a quippy label out there, it became all too easy for the next decade and a half to retroactively apply the term to non-protagonist female leads in low- to mid-budget indie films, especially where the director or screenwriter was a young male. It was essentially skeet shooting for critics. The term has been applied to (among others): Clara Bow in It, Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer, Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Chances are if a woman has won a Best Actress Oscar, she has an MPDG lurking somewhere in her IMDB credits—that is, if she’s White. (The MPDG can never be a woman of color, never.) 

Ostensibly the review that put the term into pop culture consciousness was about Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown—funny enough, a film that also partially takes place in Jersey. But the critical universe knows that the trope really was built from Sam in Garden State. Rabin even explicitly says in the article that Sam is the prime example of this trope. The review only came out three years after the premiere of Garden State, and Rabin seems to be writing from a place of pent up frustration after seeing the character portrayed on screen so many times. 

I’m not here to bury the term. Aisha Harris of Slate did that in its obituary in 2012, coincidentally when indie films really began to recede from the pop cultural imagination. If anything, you barely even hear the term in critiques now. I do want to reflect on what the term has done to Natalie Portman’s perceived performance in Garden State and the reception of the character of Sam. 

Portman is clearly acting away from type; looking at her filmography—Jackie Kennedy, Padmé Amidala, Evey Hammond, Anne Boleyn, Nina Sayers/Odette—you wouldn’t really use the terms “quirky,” “manic,” or “ditzy.” Sam stands apart from these other roles to the point of being a kind of stretch for Portman. Grace, self-assuredness, and restraint come naturally to her as an actor. Sam is anything but that. Sam jumps around emotionally and wears whatever she is feeling on her sleeve; she cannot physically sit still for an entire scene; she has that mile-a-minute way of talking common in north Jersey. Her performance of that role leaves an indelible mark on you. I would argue her performance of Sam brings a realness to an otherwise very unreal character. It may seem hard to believe, but I know people with the same mannerisms as Sam and who say and do similar (if not exactly the same) stuff as she does.

That Portman could read that script and see a performance where she is not merely an instrument to Large’s character but someone with a small arc of her own is a testament to Portman’s ability and shouldn’t be completely subsumed by flatness with which Braff otherwise writes into the character. 

‘Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown

Let Go, Frou Frou

To be completely honest, I had to rewatch the movie to write this piece. That I could not instantly recall every part is pretty surprising for the amount of pixels spilt above explaining just how important this film is to me. I had the bare outlines of the plot, but I was caught off guard by some pretty important characters who had receded from my memories of the movie. I was even surprised to see so many actors I would instantly recognize now: Denis O’Hare; Jackie Hoffman; Jim Parsons; Jean Smart; Ann Dowd; Michael Weston; Geoffrey Arend.  

Film, in memory, is not a constant continuum of plot, characters, music, and scenery. Rather, it’s isolated pieces, fragments that you try to piece together in your mind when you think back on it. It’s those pieces that you remember, but it is in the gaps between those pieces that you find meaning. Having not seen the film in probably over ten years, I was able to gloss over the film’s serious flaws and fill in some of the gaps with interpretations of my own. Watching the film one more time (with the added advantages of age and experience), I was able to see how bad but also how truly great the film is. A lot of the characters are pretty hollow; the plot is a bit janky and doesn’t quite add up when you seriously think about it; for such a diverse setting, it’s pretty much devoid of people of color (except for the hotel bellhop and Sam’s adopted brother). 

On the other hand, the film is an incredibly tight 100 minutes. The set-pieces (that is, the screen gags like Large’s shirt against the wallpaper, the broken off gas-pump, and the sinks turning on as Large walks by them) may seem forced, but they also reflect Large’s own relationship with the world around him and grow less and less frequent as the film progresses and Large abandons the crutches of pharmaceuticals and self-loathing that initially define him as a character, a clever choice to make as a director. The film is also deeply atmospheric, with the combination of excellently selected music and film techniques, that makes the viewer not merely a bystander but someone who is seeing the world through Large’s drug-laden eyes. 

Jia Tolentino once explained—and I am heavily paraphrasing here—that the act of writing itself is the point of the personal essay. An essay should not cleanly provide answers; instead, it should be an exploration of questions and whether it comes to an answer is just happenstance. That is my north star for looking back these 20 years through the prism of this deeply imperfect but meaningful film. This is not a review. I am not even going to recommend that you watch Garden State. In some strange sense, I was hoping to get a better understanding of myself, my love for movies, and why this one in particular stands out. I don’t know if I have.  

mantunes is a resident of Newark who writes about the city (and other things).