🎬 "Wasting my time in the waiting line..."
The mid 90s to the mid 00s saw a huge boom in indie auteur filmmaking. Movies like Clerks, The Mariachi, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape introduced the world to a host of new directorial voices with signature styles thanks to the growing ease of DIY filmmaking. Over the last few weeks, we've rewatched two films from that era that both take place in New Jersey, so it's time to revive an old label: "My Misspent Youth in Films"
Garden State
Directed by: Zach Braff
Starring: Zach Braff, Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman
Released: August 20, 2004
What I Thought Then
That guy from Scrubs made a movie that turned out to be the voice of a generation. It was edgy, it was funny, it had an amazing soundtrack and some fantastically quotable lines. My 24-year-old cinephile ass ate it up!
What I Think Now
Well, it's aged better than you'd think. The jokes are still funny, although there are a few that you'd probably not repeat in the year of our lord 2025—including wearing a wig and eye make-up to work in a Vietnamese restaurant and one scene that uses the r-word at length. But most of the humor is derived from situational absurdity in which Andrew "Large" Largeman (Zach Braff) plays the straight man. Hearing Three Times a Lady being belted vibrato at a graveside service is just as hilarious today as it was two decades ago.
For all of it's wackiness, the movie is oddly grounded. Braff's character arc is to slowly open up over the course of the film, which basically encompasses a transition from "detached irony" to "attached and no less ironic, but at least having some fun with it." The core conflict of the movie, such as it is, is the strained relationship between Large and his father, played with subtle enthusiasm by Ian Holm. That tension feels real and earnest, and it allows for all of the drug-fueled hijinks going on around it to play a little more extreme without sinking the whole film.
That said, the thing that's probably aged the least well is the characterization of Sam (Natalie Portman), Large's new-found love interest and the ur-example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. What felt novel and adorable in 2004 was played out and hackneyed by 2009. That said, while the character is underwritten and too quirky to take that seriously, Portman is a great actor and manages to inject some humanity into what would otherwise have been a one-note role.
The other thing I observed is that this film is very structurally similar to the genre of literature that these days we call "cozy" (as distinct from the cozy mystery, which has been around forever). The stakes are low, the conflict is minimal, there's no "Act-II turnaround" at the midpoint, it has a romance subplot that does not follow the beats of a romance arc. It felt very structureless at the time, but yeah it's totally a cozy. It also hangs one hell of a lantern on the central conceit of the movie: Large is over-medicated and just stops taking his pills. The psychiatrist he speaks to agrees that he is taking huge doses and advises against going cold-turkey, and devotes a good amount of dialog to saying that meds or not, Large needs to be in some kind of therapy if he wants to deal with his trauma. And that's a good lesson.
So yeah, it's most holds up. On the other hand...
Chasing Amy
Directed by: Kevin Smith
Starring: Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee
Released: April 18, 1997
What I Thought Then
This was the third of Smith's "Jay and Bob" movies and by far my favorite. I'd first tried to watch it in high school (because it was on HBO and had a warning for sexually explicit content—do with that what you will) but bounced off it because its pro-gay stance offended by religious sensibilities (do with that what you will... there's a lot to unpack). I gave up homophobia in college and fell in love with the movie, its quirky dialog, its over-the-top characters, and what I thought was a dynamite ending.
What I Think Now
How the hell did Ethan Suplee get billed over Jason Lee, who is the actual third-most-important role? Also, it's amazing how much smoking there is in this movie.
Holden (Affleck) and Banky (Lee), so named in order to have a production company called Bank Hold-Up, are the creators of the underground comic sensation Bluntman and Chronic, starring a thinly-veiled Jay and Silent Bob. They meet up with Alyssa Jones (Adams), author of the lesbian comic book Idiosyncratic Routine. Holden's into her, finds out she's a lesbian (surprise!) and bails. But then she forces her way back into his life because she likes him and wants to be friends. The friendship turns romantic despite all odds, which blows up Alyssa's life as well as Holden's friendship with the rampantly homophobic Banky. Hijinks ensue.
For all the bluster and Kevin-Smith-isms, this follows the trajectory of a by-the-numbers romance. They meet and are repulsed, but then something is there, then they sleep together at the mid-point, and then it collapses only for Holden to make a grand gesture at the end in order to prove his love. More on that in a bit. And the romance works. Adams and Affleck have decent chemistry, although they are occasionally weighed down by Smith's prose and its constant editorializing. There's a great blossoming-friendship montage in the beginning of Act II (seriously, when do you see montages anymore?) and some subtleties that I picked up on this most recent viewing, like the fact that Alyssa adopts the phrase "Jesus, Patzer" from Holden.
It's also probably Smith's best made film, certainly the best made of his Jay and Bob movies. I love the parallelism of bookending the movie with Comic Con. Smith does a great job of marrying scene action to subtext. It ain't subtle—nor is it supposed to be—like when Holden and Alyssa have a fight at a hockey game while the hockey players are also slugging each other. It's solid filmmaking and shows a lot growth from Clerks and Mallrats. It digs pretty deeply into complex emotions and relationships and relegates Jay and Bob to the obligatory scene where Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) states the theme directly to the audience. There are a number of easter eggs tying this to Smith's other films, and they mostly work, with one notable exception. After the above-mentioned hockey game Alyssa is screaming at Holden about something awful that had been done to her by Shannon Hamilton, and it undercuts the tension of the scene a bit to stop and think "Hey, wasn't that Affleck's role in Mallrats?"
All of that said, it has not aged well at all. While it was progressive for its time—and I believe it got an official thumbs-up from GLADD—it feels a little clumsy by today's standards. Homophobic slurs like "d*ke" and "f*g" get slung around by straight characters, including the one that's not supposed to be a homophobe. Alyssa's main conflict in the second half of the movie is that her friends have ostracized her because she's not gay anymore. In the year of our lord 2025, we'd call this sort of thing "bisexual erasure." Beyond even the gay agenda stuff (I'm kidding, I'm kidding) some of the edgy humor has lost a lot of its edge. Such as when Banky is showing bestiality porn to a kindergartner at a train station. It ain't funny anymore.
All of that said, the ending is still great and that redeems a lot of other things for me. While it has followed the beats of a romance plot pretty straightly (ahem), it does not have a happy ending. Instead of making a grand gesture to redeem himself and prove his love, Holden takes a different tack. He decides that he's just insecure about his own sexual experience compared to Alyssa and that Banky is secretly curious about men, and that the best way to solve everything is for them to have a threesome. Alyssa argues against it, and when Holden won't listen, she walks out of his life forever. The "I love you... [slap]... But I'm not your whore" beat at the end of that scene is jaw-dropping.
And that's what I love about this movie. Holden doesn't actually learn his lesson or grow or change, so it ends tragically. He has blown up the two most important relationships in his life, and he never gets them back. There's a scene at Comic Con the following year in which we see Banky working alone and Alyssa with a new girlfriend. Holden has a brief reconciliation with each of them, but despite the fact that now he's grown and learned and changed, he doesn't get the happy ending he wanted, because losing that happy ending was the catalyst that actually caused him to grow.
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