Garden State is Zach Braff’s directorial debut, and the film shows that this new director is beginning on a sophomore foot. Braff fills his frames with connotation and personality, as we (the viewers) know that this story is a personal struggle through self discovery and Oedipal completion.

After opening Garden State with a dream that foreshadows Largeman’s (Zach Braff) upcoming non-chemical adventure -- well, almost non-chemical -- Braff uses bird’s eye, overhead camera angles and negative space to illustrate the loneliness and utter absence of any affection around the character. Largeman lies in a room completely absent of color; the camera catches him through a ceiling fan in the foreground. Largeman’s mother’s funeral begins with an overhead angle, and the camera tilts down into a beautiful use of mise-en-scène: in the foreground we are in an associated point of view with Largeman; in the midground stands the funeral’s audience; and in the background, grave stones cover the green grass. With all of this in a deep focus shot, we can’t help but feel the gloom upon which the protagonist reflects.

Braff’s use of negative space around Largeman becomes a metaphor for the missing affections from his mother, but his negative space is filled (both in the story and cinematically) with Natalie Portman’s character, Sam. Sam is not only filling the celluloid time and space; she fills Largeman’s Oedipus Complex that has not made its normal completion.

Freud’s Oedipus Complex needs to unfold normally; the mother cannot be a boy’s first love throughout his life: the emotional feelings of the son must be transferred to another individual; this is healthy. But what if the mother was never there, emotionally? There are many disruptions of Freud’s theory in Garden State. Largeman’s friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) cannot deal with the fact that his mother, Carol, (Jean Smart) is sexually involved with a young man whom both he and Largeman went to high school with. Mark’s relationship with his mother is obviously abnormal; after all, she brings home young men and does drugs with her son. On the other hand, Mark’s relationship with his mom is ideal compared to Largeman’s absence of a mother and the guilt he has felt for accidentally causing her to be paralyzed from the waist down. Braff uses his medium well, as Largeman, Mark, and Carol sit in a closed form, long shot. Mark and his mother argue about success, but when Mark’s mother leaves, she kisses her son on the forehead twice (they are the only two characters in the frame). The film then cross cuts to Largeman with a black marker smudge on his forehead -- somebody wrote "balls" on his forehead the night before. As Largeman makes an expression of happiness and disappointment, the black smudge on his forehead becomes a metaphor for the absence of motherly love.

It is very easy to assume that Sam becomes the mother figure in Largeman’s life, but considering she is obviously missing paternal traits, this is not accurate: Sam causes a hamster to die, she needs to wear a helmet to work, and she is a compulsive liar; therefore, she is not fit, at the moment, to be a mother. Although, the first time we meet Sam in Garden State she is in the frame with Largeman -- he is captured in soft focus and Sam is in smooth focus but in the same frame -- rack focusing switches our attention to Largeman, now in smooth focus. This use of focus in the planes of existence shows these two characters will become one another, as a loving couple. Sam may not become the mother figure Largeman needs, but she allows him to skip the Oedipal process of maturation by simply teaching him how to express emotion through experience.

There are not that many new directors that use the medium of film as it should be used: to create tropes with the semiotics of cinema. In his debut, Zach Braff displays his knowledge of cinema language and lets it wrap around his story.

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© Copyright Brad Guillory 2005. No part of this article may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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