Braff: Wish I Was Here (2014)

Ten years ago, Zach Braff was as ambitious to be the voice of his generation as James Franco is today. In a way, he succeeded with Garden State, or at least succeeded in a more concerted, singular way than Franco’s multiple projects ever have. However, that just appears to have made it all the more traumatic, a decade later, to no longer be the voice of his generation – or to still be the voice of his generation, but to find, on the cusp of his forties, that that’s no longer such a glamorous thing. From that perspective, the notorious Kickstarter campaign that funded Wish I Was Here is absolutely integral to its project, since it’s clear that by this point Braff needs to feel an entire generation backing him, offering up his sophomore effort with a chronic lack of confidence, an acute self-consciousness about slipping into the limelight, that would utterly consume it were it not so concretely assured of its audience in advance. Even as it stands, it takes place in a kind of sustained limelight, which Braff more or less conceals as the perpetual summer twilight where this Los Angeles version of Garden State unfolds. And for all that that generates a much brighter sheen than rural New Jersey, the transition from Garden State to Golden State is fairly imperceptible, as Braff once again unfolds a series of inspirational tableaux, slow-mo, hi-five convoys designed to rouse a generation into the epiphany that they are a generation. Admittedly, this time around, Braff's a family man, with a wife (Kate Hudson), father (Mandy Patinkin), brother (Josh Gad) and kids to take care of, just as all the moments of generational communion, all the mutual salutes to a future we can make our own, take place between him and his kids, rather than his contemporaries. Yet Braff's charisma isn’t really altered by being disseminated as a parent rather than a peer – if anything, it just clarifies how much he aspires to be a seer, a purveyor of wisdom, taking us on an exhortative road trip that starts with him deciding to home school his kids and ends with him becoming a theatre teacher. Of course, that’s all qualified by Braff's sense of indie self-effacement, or at least his sense that being indie means being self-effacing  – he's still the struggling actor, the neglected son, the cutesy dreamer – but even that feels somewhat overgentrified, as if the film were finally afraid of being too indie to satisfy Braff’s ambitions, which only seem to have expanded since Garden State into the sci-fi fringes that were apparently the point of contention with his producers here, and which led him to seek out crowdfunding in the first place. As fascinating as it is, then, to watch someone do exactly the same thing ten years later, it's a film that doesn’t leave a great deal of room for you as an audience – you crowdfund it by watching it, kickstart it by buying tickets to it, engage with it only by turning yourself into a bit player in Braff's most expensive, extravagant cutaway to date.