Garden State (2004) on Netflix
Andrew Largeman, an actor in Los Angeles, returns to New Jersey for his mother's funeral and quits the medication his psychiatrist father prescribed. In a doctor's waiting room he meets Sam.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.4/10228,589 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Andrew Largeman is 26 and works as a waiter in Los Angeles. He has taken lithium and antidepressants since he was ten, all prescribed by his father Gideon, a psychiatrist. When his mother dies, Andrew flies back to his New Jersey hometown, the first time in nine years, and decides to stop taking the pills. Two gravediggers he knows from school, Mark and Dave, ask him to come along to a party. Andrew goes and smokes marijuana and takes ecstasy but stays detached. Headaches send him to a neurologist's office, where he meets Sam, a young woman who admits she lies for no reason she can name. He offers her a ride home, meets her mother and learns that Sam has epilepsy. Back at the house, Gideon insists on a talk before Andrew leaves.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Garden State (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Garden State was filmed over 25 days in April and May 2003 on a budget of $2.5 million, down from $6 million at the suggestion of Gary Gilbert, a co-founder of Rocket Mortgage and first-time film producer, so that he could produce the entire film himself.
- The film was first screened on January 16, 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was bought in a joint venture by Fox Searchlight Pictures and Miramax for $5 million, double the film's budget.
- The film is partly autobiographical: Zach Braff said that when he wrote Garden State he was completely depressed, waiting tables and as lonesome as he had ever been, and that the script was a way to articulate feeling alone, isolated and homesick for a place that did not exist.
- Garden State was Zach Braff's debut as writer and director. He first wanted to call it Large's Ark, in reference to his own character, but changed it because no one understood what it meant; the title also alludes to New Jersey's nickname and to lines from Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden".
- Natalie Portman's character Sam has been used as an example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, a term coined soon after Garden State was released, though in reference to another movie.
