Hasn't aged so well in parts

Natalie Portman is adorable in any era.

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The sun is shining... but the ice is slippery.

What does that even mean?

Whatever it means, the movie looks to me like it could've been made yesterday. Well, except that it would be one of the better movies made in awhile if it was that new.

It has not aged well at all. It's at best a mediocre film. Apparently not many people saw it because there are so few threads here on the message board.

Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar, and / or doesn't.

Garden State's message I guess is about being 'real' and 'deep' and 'true', so the scenes that are actually a little superficial seem to stand out more to me now than when I saw the movie when it first came out. But tbh those scenes are few, and thankfully most of the movie still stands up well. Garden State is Pivotal in the coming of age genre...

P.S. Natalie Portman is a Goddess...

It was huge a decade ago, but people rarely talk about it anymore. Maybe it spoke to youth in the mid-2000s, but seems irrelevant to millennials.

I'm thinking the real problem is not that it hasn't aged, but that you have. I saw this when it came out at 21 and I loved it. But watching it again just now, at 33, it just fell flat. The way you see the world at 21 just isn't the same as the way you see the world at 33. Things that used to be so important, just aren't.

Quirky movies like these never age well. I don't think it was ever fresh to begin with, just an easy film to pass the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by "aged well"? Does it have wrinkles and pock marks in some spots? Does the audio or scenery drop out at certain points?

Anyways, when I first saw this film I immediately figured out that Large's dilemma was his dependency of medication to shield him from a tragic accident we later learned happened between him and his mother, whose funeral spurned his return to NJ for the funeral, and that at the end he realized that he never needed to be on meds in the first place. I guess if you grew up with similar circumstances you identify more with this movie, but the quirkiness and surreal scenes Braff inserts into various parts of the film are all part of his drug-addled mind reconfiguring events as they fold out before him.

Case in point, it's probably not true that his close friend became a multi-millionaire for inventing "silent" velcro, and his close buddy (Sarsgaard) didn't really take him on that wild goose chase to find his "gift". It was all part of his mind's psychosis in dealing with everyday realities of old friends in New Jersey. All the while he was in Hollywood playing characters outside of his own reality. He was living a double dosage of artificiality and at the end he decides to stay back home detox with Natalie Portman. I would too.