Have you ever made a mixtape? It’s kind of a silly question to ask with the advent of the ubiquitous portable music player and the constant soundtracking most people do of their everyday lives. Putting different songs together to fit a situation, a mood we find ourselves in, or emotion we feel about something or someone has become almost a natural thing for us.
The convention of the mixtape is where the genesis and the strengths of the soundtrack of 2004 indie film Garden State come about. The songs used in the film were put together by writer, director and star Zach Braff from the songs that he felt were scoring his life at the time he wrote the screenplay.
The film is a story of love, life and loss. It’s a film about comprehending, understanding and dealing with all the intense emotions experiences can bombard a person with.
The first song used in the film is “Don’t Panic” by Coldplay, and it comes right at the start of the movie. After Andrew Largeman (Braff) wakes from a dream of a plane crashing to receive a call from his father telling of his mother’s death, we get a view into the life of the main character. The lyrics, “And we live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, yeah we do,” sung by Chris Martin seem at odds and contrary to the droll, unaffected way Largeman is living his life. He fights his way through L.A. traffic to make it to a day job he obviously doesn’t care about. He’s so out of it that he forgets to unhook the gas nozzle from his car.
It is this interplay between the music and the story being told within a film that marks the difference between a good soundtrack and a great soundtrack, and it can be found throughout the rest of Garden State. There are two different ways that this interplay really works: a song can define a scene, or a scene can define a song.
The latter happens within a scene that comes after Largeman has headed back home and attends a party with some old friends of his who are now the gravediggers who buried his mother. He smokes some marijuana and takes some ecstasy, and the party around him starts moving in a time-lapse fashion as he sits in the same unemotional and nonresponsive state he has been in for the entire movie. Zero 7’s “In The Waiting Line” plays in the background of the scene. If you had heard the song beforehand, you probably would not have thought of this downtempo groove being part of a party scene, but the time-lapse style of Largeman waiting for the drugs to have some type of an effect on him make this the perfect scene for this song.
The very definition of a song defining a scene comes about in the next part of the film. As Largeman waits in a doctor’s office to try and fix what is wrong with him, we meet Sam (Natalie Portman), an interesting and emotional woman who is alive in many ways that Largeman is not. She intrigues him and introduces him to a song that she promises will change his life. As she puts her headphones on him, “New Slang” by The Shins starts playing. It is this sharing of herself that does indeed change his life and lights a spark within him that eventually grows to break him out of the unemotional, unfeeling wasteland he has been living in.
A great soundtrack within a film is not all about the songs being used. It is also about how they are used. When the songs are put directly into the film, such as how “New Slang” is played on Sam’s headphones and how later “Blue Eyes” by Cary Brothers is played quiet and in the background to sound like it is coming from a jukebox or a performer while Sam and Andrew are at a bar, they feel like more than just music. The songs actually become woven into the fibers of the film.
The soundtrack of Garden State also contains an element of musical narrative that is often found within opera: motif. Motif is a recurring sound used to illustrate some sort of symbolic significance. The song “Adelita” by Francisco Tárrega is used within this capacity. It is first played in an ice-skating video of Sam, and it is later played on guitar by Largeman’s old best friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard). The song is used to show the emotional connection that both Sam and Mark share with Largeman and the affect they both have on bringing him back into the real world.
The song “Lebanese Blonde” by Thievery Corporation is used perfectly to give an exotic and out-of-place feeling to a scene where Mark, Sam and Largeman all go to the back room of a hotel and watch a projection of sex that is happening in one of the rooms of the hotel with a group of people. Another song, “The Only Living Boy in New York” by Simon and Garfunkel, is used in a scene after the group finally meets up with a jewelry collector who has the favorite necklace of Largeman’s dead mother that Mark had taken off her body and sold when he buried her. It serves to signal Largeman’s near-complete emotional awakening.
The last scene and song of the movie is a very powerful one. Largeman has seemingly deciding to leave Sam and go back to L.A. to figure out his life, but as “Let Go” by Frou Frou starts playing, he second-guesses himself and realizes that he needs Sam in his life. He decides to “let go and jump in” to this new life with her.
The music of this film is the most powerful part about it, and in creating this mixtape of a soundtrack, Braff won a Grammy. It’s obvious that this is one mixtape that changed his life. Keep creating mixtapes, and maybe one will change your life.
