A Magnificent Story of Change

While watching a movie like Garden State you easily notice that it holds a lot of elements that makes up a good screenplay. Garden State does, in fact, excellently use a lot of the great elements. Along side the basics like the inciting incident, plot points, and so on; the script is loaded with tons of subtle symbols, themes and motifs, and excellent foreshadowing.
Zach Braff writes, directs, and stars in this heart-warming and funny movie about a young man, Andrew Largeman, who returns home from a nine year absence for his mother’s funeral. His mother’s funeral is the inciting incident. It is the event that will once again bring him home and start his life over again. It will also give him a chance to reconnect with his father and their distant relationship. While he is home he meets a very peculiar and loveable girl named Sam.
Meeting her is the Plot Point near the end of Act one that takes us into the second act. Upon meeting her, we see an instant connection and know that the scenes to come will be them getting to know each other. He faces many obstacles in Act 2 that she helps him overcome (along with the help of his old friends). Andrew is a very emotionless character who has been living his life numbed on depression and an assortment of other medications. He stopped taking them and realized that he hasn’t needed them to get by in life.
His realization that he must face his mistakes in his past, a painful yet successful reconnection with his father, and the like for this new girl all work collectively to bring us into the third act of the screenplay. Here he will deconstruct his thoughts and start to see who he is and his purpose in life. At first, he thinks he must return to the life he has been living the past nine years and start from there. At the airport he says his final goodbyes to his Sam and they part ways. This is the climax of the screenplay. He rose above all his mental and emotional problems, and in entering the resolution went through a magnificent character change. But does he leave his hometown and Sam, or leave the life he thought he knew miles away and act on his change of heart, mind, and overall character?