hecklongtree

I'm really starting to doubt that I'll ever see a good new film again. Screenwriters nowadays don't seem to have the slightest idea of how to hold an audience's attention. The problem with contemporary film: Filmmakers present us with a situation, but give us no story.

Case in point: Zach Braff's "Garden State." (For another case in point, see "The Station Agent," where a little person moves to rural New Jersey to inhabit an abandoned train station and manages to make a couple of friends--that's it; that's the whole movie, I swear to God!) The situation in "Garden State:" A young actor, who's on bad terms with his father and hasn't spoken to his father in a while, returns home to New Jersey to attend his mother's funeral. While there, he and his father attempt a reconcilation.

Out of this germ of a story, a compelling plot could have been constructed, but Braff didn't seem to know how to do it.

The script, like most film and tv scripts today, contains one or two ingredients from the successful, but often maligned, well-made play formula.

The well-made play is a plot structure developed by the successful but often maligned 19th Century playwright, Eugne Scribe, and it consists of the following elements:

1. A plot based on a withheld secret,
2. inititial exposition summarizing the backstory (what happened before the play began), followed by slowly rising dramatic tension, created through plot twists involving misunderstandings, mistaken identity, etc.;
3. a battle of wits between adversaries ensues, and each side has its ups and downs;
4. a peripety, i.e, an unexpected reversal of fortune followed by a climactic obligatory scene, sometimes called the scne faire ;
5. a logical denoument;
6. each act is a microcosm of the play as a whole, in that it repeats the same basic pattern;
7. stage props often play an important role, as in, e.g., the letter, in Somerset Maugham's "The Letter," or a fan, in Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan," or a glass of water in Scribe's own "Verre d'eau," "A Glass of Water" (it's what Hitchcock called "the McGuffin");
8. a moral to the story.

"Garden State" contains two out of the eight elements: Secrets (concerning why Zach Braff's character is the way he is--disturbed and withdrawn--and how his mother wound up crippled) and an obligatory scene (when he talks to his father). That's all there is. There's just a series of episodes before (and notice I didn't say leading up to) the scenes that adhere to the well-made play formula: (1) the scene where Braff's character reveals to his friends how, as child, he accidently injured his mother and (2) the scene where he talks with his father and says, in a scene totally lacking in dramatic tension, that he no longer feels guilty about what he did, since his actions were the actions of a child.

The good thing about the well-made play is that it leads the audience's attention forward from scene to scene. The bad thing is that it creates crises that are contrived. People are often put in dilemmas where they have to choose between two drastic alternatives, one of which, almost invariably, is suicide. (For the characters involved, this certainly "forces the issue," but it's not true to life, since, in life, people rarely have to choose between only two alternatives, and one of those is rarely suicide.

Contemporary filmmakers create films that contain the worst of both worlds. Whereas before, with the well-made play formula, we had films that had plots, but they were contrived. Now, we have movies with no plot and they're still contrived, only now they contain contrived situations instead of contrived crises. This especially true of "The Station Agent," where a dwarf, a lunch wagon operator, and an artist are thrown together for no apparent reason.

Put in the dilemma of having to choose one of these two types of drama to watch, I'd choose the well-made play every time. Anything's better than having to sit through the tedium of "Garden State" and "The Station Agent!"