Garden State

Zach Braff wrote, directed and starred in his first feature, and has said he was depressed, waiting tables and as lonesome as ever while writing it. The film was first called Large’s Ark and the title changed because nobody understood it; the one that replaced it points both at the nickname for New Jersey and at a line from Andrew Marvell’s poem The Garden. Shooting took 25 days across April and May 2003, mostly in South Orange, the town Braff grew up in. The budget was 2.5 million dollars; by Braff’s account the producer Gary Gilbert brought the figure down from 6 million so that he could finance the whole thing himself. After the Sundance screening in January 2004, Fox Searchlight and Miramax jointly bought worldwide rights for 5 million, double the budget. The box office finished at 35.8 million. The song selection Braff assembled himself won Best Compilation Soundtrack Album at the Grammys in 2005. A good fit if you want a week in which going home and coming off the pills happen at once, carried by encounters rather than incident. Not for a viewer who will read Natalie Portman’s Sam as a device for reviving the man; that label was coined after this film, about a different one, and then attached here.