Garden State

Natalie Portman and Zach Zach Braff in a coming-of-age story that starts out pretty cynically as a successful young actor returns to New Jersey and confronts oddballs and deadbeats in his hometown. Even the most interesting characters struck me as pastiches of one kind or another. One particularly good scene has Zach making a smart-alecky comment about Natalie’s dead pet, and Natalie calling him out on it. It ends better than it begins, with the guy more or less confronting ‘life’, just saying ‘no’ to lithium, and committing himself to the beautiful young woman.