Garden State
A numbed-out actor comes home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, meets a girl who lies compulsively and feels everything, and slowly wakes up. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in his 2004 indie debut while playing J.D. on Scrubs — and its Grammy-winning Shins-and-Coldplay soundtrack became the mixtape of the mid-2000s.
Zach Braff was three seasons into Scrubs when he premiered Garden State at Sundance in January 2004 — a film he had written, directed, and starred in, shot largely in and around his actual hometown of South Orange, New Jersey. He played Andrew Largeman, a lightly famous, heavily medicated actor who returns home for his mother's funeral and starts feeling things again, mostly because of Sam, Natalie Portman's motormouthed, epileptic, compulsively honest-about-her-lying love interest. Peter Sarsgaard rounded it out as the gravedigger friend still orbiting their hometown, and Ian Holm as the psychiatrist father who prescribed the numbness.
The Sundance premiere set off a bidding war that ended with Fox Searchlight and Miramax jointly paying $5 million for worldwide rights — double the film's $2.5 million budget — and the bet paid off: Garden State grossed over $35 million worldwide and became the indie touchstone of its year. Its visual jokes (the shirt made from the bathroom wallpaper, the scream into the "infinite abyss") became instant shorthand for a certain mid-2000s sensibility: quirky, sincere, a little medicated, deeply invested in its own record collection.
About that record collection: the soundtrack Braff compiled — The Shins, Iron & Wine, Frou Frou, Simon & Garfunkel — won the 2005 Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and arguably outlived the film itself. Portman's Sam handing over her headphones and promising that The Shins will change your life is the movie's most quoted moment, and for thousands of people it literally happened that way: the CD was the gateway drug to indie music, passed between dorm rooms like contraband.
Garden State's reputation has ridden the full hype cycle since — era-defining, then overexposed, then a punchline for twee 2000s indie excess, and now, at twenty years' distance, something gentler: a time capsule of what sincerity looked like right before irony took over the internet.
Similar items
Zach Braff
The 2000s' designated sensitive everyman: J.D. on Scrubs for nine years, writer-director-star of Garden State, and the guy whose iPod playlist a million college kids quietly adopted as a personality. For one decade, Zach Braff's daydreaming, monologuing, indie-scored inner life was the inner life of the culture.
Scrubs
The hospital show that could cut from a surreal daydream about a floating head to genuine grief—all in one episode. Scrubs proved that comedies could be funny and devastating, that a laugh track wasn't required when your writing was this sharp, and that TV bromance could hit as hard as any drama.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
"Stay classy, San Diego." Will Ferrell's mustachioed 1970s news anchor Ron Burgundy and his idiot news team gave the 2000s an endlessly quotable comedy — "I love lamp," "60% of the time, it works every time."
Donnie Darko
The film that nearly died at the box office six weeks after 9/11, then rose from the dead through midnight screenings and DVD to become the 2000s' defining cult artifact. A nightmarish fever dream about time loops and a rabbit suit that you'd lend to friends with just 'watch it' and argue about until 3 a.m.