Gardener of Eden is a darkly comic update of Taxi Driver. If that
sounds both odd and ambitious, you're readin' it right, bro.
Adam is a 25-ish slacker whose posse has drifted into dead-end
lives since high school. His friends just turned their part-time
high school jobs into full-time employment, but Adam took a more
complicated route to his deli counter job. He got accepted into a
good college, then got kicked out for bringing prostitutes into his
dorm room. He then went back to his small town in Jersey and joined
his friends in the blue collar world.
Things started going badly for him. On a single day, he lost his
job, he watched a sweet old woman die, and his parents kicked him
out of the house. He snapped. He got shit-faced and filled with
rage, then became determined to beat the hell out of the next man he
met. He did just that, and that scene ended with the police pulling
him off the battered victim. Then a miracle happened. Instead of
going to jail as a menace to the community, he was hailed as a hero.
The man he assaulted was a wanted rapist, and Adam attacked him just
minutes after his latest rape. Adam was given plaques and reward
money. His parents took him back in. Everyone in town wanted to
shake his hand. The people of his small town suddenly started
treating him like a combination of Brad Pitt and Jesus.
All of this went to his head, and interacted with some confused
notions which had already been simmering in there for a while, with
the result being that he now fancies himself a comic book hero, a
super vigilante who has been chosen by destiny to clean the scum off
the streets. He prepares himself for the role, ala Travis Bickle,
with fighting lessons and firearms and long rigorous workouts. When
he considers himself ready, he starts wandering through his own town
in search of crime, but finds little, and manages to accomplish
nothing beyond making the police aware that he might be a dangerous
nuisance. Frustrated to be a super hero in a town which doesn't need
one, he starts heading into the big city every night, wandering
through the worst neighborhoods of New York in search of criminals
to apprehend.
He gets into some trouble and when it becomes too dangerous for
him to return to New York, our super hero turns his focus back to
his little town and the only local character worthy of becoming his
nemesis: a drug dealer so small-time that he uses his bicycle to
deliver the merchandise. The guy is not exactly Doctor Doom, but a
super hero needs a super villain and Schwinn-boy is the only
available candidate.
There are about five scenes and/or plot elements which are direct
references to Taxi Driver, but that doesn't really matter much,
because Gardener of Eden is not a rip-off, but an homage, with a
completely different attitude and a unique world of its own. The
film can turn deadly serious at times, and the plot encompasses some
dark themes like the impact of rape on the victim, but mostly it is
a comic riff on the vigilante concept. The tone does get darker and
darker as the film progresses, but it never loses sight of the fact
that its main character is not an animal or a moron, but was and is
essentially a nice, intelligent, suburban type of kid with flights
of fancy that just happen to land in crazytown. The film remains
lighter than Taxi Driver because Adam is a much more likeable and
light-hearted fellow than Travis Bickle.
The film has some problems in the middle. A couple of ideas are
raised and dropped. A couple of scenes seem to have been isolated
from earlier or later scenes which were simply not there, probably
lost in the editing process. At one point, I even felt that some of
the scenes might have been shown in the wrong order. Fortunately,
those things don't matter much in the big picture. The first thirty
minutes of the film are entertaining and pretty damned funny, and I
got hooked immediately on the storyline and the characters, so I was
willing to ride through the rough spots later. And there's more to
like. The bike-riding pusher was played with cynical elan by
scene-stealing Giovanni Ribisi, and the rivalry between the petty
drug dealer and the vigilante was handled with surprising
understatement. The film showed remarkably effective restraint in
portraying how they settled their differences (or failed to). On
balance, I was quite satisfied with the experience until about five
minutes before the credits, when the plot suddenly devolved into an
unsatisfying, unexpected and somewhat confusing ending. I guess the
creators just weren't sure how to get out of the storyline, because
the film doesn't really end at all. Although there is a major (and
somewhat baffling) dramatic development about two minutes before the
closing credits, the events after that make the film seem to be the
pilot for a TV series which will feature the continuing adventures
of Adam.
The producer and director of this film may surprise you. The
producer is about as heavy as heavyweights come these days -
superstar Leo DiCaprio. The director is DiCaprio's friend Kevin
Connelly, better known as "E" on Entourage. (The guy who plays
Turtle on Entourage is in the cast of Gardener of Eden.)
It doesn't look like this film is going anywhere, since it
debuted at Tribeca in the Spring of 2007 and has since disappeared
for a year and a half, but Connelly did a solid job. His talent is
unrefined at this point, but it's definitely there. The film has a
lot of great moments. Connelly has a great eye and ear, and may just
turn out to be a helluva director.
