Garden State

Garden State is an absolutely fantastic movie about a boy who returns home after nine years to deal with his past and find himself. The story takes place during his short visit home after his mom’s death, and focuses especially on a new relationship he forms.

During his visit, Largeman meets up with old friends and makes a few new ones, particularly a girl named Sam, who he falls in love with. Her character is really incredible. She is free-spirited and enjoys life, something he hasn’t been doing. She is energetic, outgoing, and full of life… basically everything his opposite. For the past nine years, he’s been on anti-depressant drugs and said he felt so numb for all of it. He leaves his drugs in L.A. when he returns home, however, and Sam is able to make him feel again. She changes his life. She helps him feel love, hope, pain, and originality, and from that he is able to work through his past and gain the courage to let go and forgive.

I absolutely adore their relationship. They’re so different, but have an amazing connection. Sam helps him discover so much that it would seen the relationship is more one way, but she falls completely in love with him too, which is a gift to her. He brought joy into her life as well.

The ending is great. The movie concludes with Sam and Largeman at the airport, where he is about to catch a flight back to L.A. As he gets ready to leave for his gate, he says their relationship is not over, but that he just needs to return to L.A. to get things sorted out and that he’ll find her when he’s done. The next scene is Sam crying in one of the payphone booths, and you’re sad because the movie is ending with such uncertainty. They’re not together and who knows what will happen. Then the true ending comes, when Largeman finds her in the payphone booth and says, “You remember that idea I had about working stuff out on my own and then finding you once I figured stuff out? It's dumb. It's dumb. It's an awful idea. I'm not gonna do it, okay? 'Cause like you said, this is it. This is life. And I'm in love with you, Samantha. I think that's the only thing I've ever been really sure of in my entire life.”

And then the movie can end happily, because although so much uncertainty still remains, at least they’re going to face life together. And that’s the only way he had changed as much as he had been, being together with her. With Sam, he had found security, and the home he was missing. He feels again. It’s a beautiful reminder that we were not meant to be alone. Life is difficult, and often we can’t face it alone, but that’s why we were created for relationship.

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