Movie Review: ‘Wish I Was Here’

Movie Review: 'Wish I Was Here'
Zach Braff and Joey King in ‘Wish I Was Here’

In 2004, I saw Garden State in the theaters 21 times. Twenty-One Times. Within that clearly obsessive run, there were even two occasions where I sat and watched all four showings in a day. Yes. I know. There are medical professionals willing to listen. They cost more.

Now, I bill myself as a film critic. As such, I’d be remiss if I didn’t once again mention that there can be two completely different realities when a film manages to resonate with an audience. Speaking as a film critic, Garden State is a whole heap of first-time director mistakes on the part of Zach Braff. Speaking as a film lover, Garden State is a whole heap of repressed emotion painted on the screen like a Jackson Pollack painting that unlocked feelings I spent a great deal of time putting away. Being roughly the same age as Braff, I shared many of the fears, insecurities, and roadblocks in nearing the cusp of 30.

Now, ten years later, he’s back with Wish I Was Here. And as I begin to process what I just saw on-screen, while it’s not a sequel by any normal definition of that word, the movie is a continuation of the male developmental journey Braff began a decade ago and of which he seems so set on exploring.

In Garden State, Braff played a semi-successful actor come home to New Jersey from L.A. to bury his mother and break free of the emotional prison built out of guilt and guarded by mind-numbing prescription pills. In Wish I Was Here, Braff plays a failed actor in L.A., married with two kids, blind to the one-sided nature of his marriage when it comes to whose dreams matter most, and who must find a way to connect more with his kids and bring his brother and father back together again before Dad’s cancer renders any such reconciliation impossible.

The characters Braff portrays are far more similar than they are different, and as the linear manner in which we agree to understand time dictates, he and I remain roughly the same age … sharing many of the fears, insecurities, and roadblocks inherent in nearing the cusp of 40. So I doubt it comes as much of a surprise that I identified and related to many of the core emotions in the character.

But has Braff’s writing and directing skills improved in this past decade? Actually, yes. He still injects metric tons of quirk and idiosyncrasy into the characters, dialogue, and visuals. So if you found his style to be pretentious or maybe even arrogant back in 2004, you may have many of the same issues. However, the story is tighter this time around, and the connections between the oddball characters make more sense and feel less forced. It’s still primarily about father/son issues but the editing is also much improved, and I think there were applied lessons he learned from Garden State in terms of making sure there was enough coverage and consistency to make a scene work without tempting the audience to play too many continuity games.

As the film deals with the unstoppable and inevitable deterioration of the patriarch in the family, it’s also quite likely that a few tears may find their way out of your eyes and onto your face. We’re not talking the kind of gut-wrenching and unabashed weeping of something like The Fault in Our Stars but a number of heart-to-heart talks may just get to you, but I would imagine that if you saw Garden State, you already knew that for whatever strange humor that may be displayed on screen, there would be an emotional counterbalance.

And now the $64 question … should you go see the movie? Well, I think if you liked Garden State this is a fairly simple yes. I don’t see myself having the time to watch Wish I Was Here 21 times in the theaters but I do plan on seeing it at least one or two more times so I can really open myself up to the full enchilada. (Dammit, now I’m hungry). The performances are earnest, even when they’re being snarky, and while there still seems to be an almost narcissistic quality to Braff’s efforts in total, I guess I’m just as narcissistic because the emotions still manage to connect. This won’t win any big awards but it will end up on my Blu-ray shelf. Hopefully, that tells you what you need to know.

GRADE: B

Wish I Was Here is rated R for language and some sexual content