If pressed to weigh in on the subject of first impressions, I'd have to say that watching a dog hump a strange man's leg seems unlikely to predispose a young woman to romance-especially when factoring in the man's helpless inability to ward off said humping. Yet in Zach Braff's Garden State, this very scenario has Sam (Natalie Portman) sidling up to Andrew Largeman (Braff) with her eyelashes aflutter and a song in her CD player that will "change his life." Never mind the fact that the dog in question, a seeing-eye dog, would a) not be let off its leash in public and b) have been fixed before entering service. It had to be a seeing-eye dog because Sam and Andrew had to meet in a doctor's waiting room, establishing the fact that both characters are vulnerable, he numbly and she blithely so. (She isn't put off by the humping, we soon learn, because she has several badly behaving dogs of her own at home.) The whole scene, in other words, is a pretext.

The overarching premise of the film is that Largeman, on a multitude of drugs since early childhood, when a tantrum inadvertently led to his mother's crippling paralysis, has left the pills-prescribed by his psychiatrist father-in his medicine chest to fly home for her funeral. Thus there's a chemical reason for his reawakening to the world of feeling, though we have to remind ourselves of this by the end, when we're asked to believe that Sam, after four days' acquaintance, has single-handedly taught him how to laugh, cry and love (not to mention that more elusive trick, to forgive). This sentimental resolution softens the edges of earlier, more promising moments, of which the most powerful takes place at a party put on by Largeman's former classmate, now the rich inventor of silent Velcro, for his other former classmates, among them gravediggers (and robbers). Obviously uncomfortable, Largeman is offered Ecstasy. "Well," he says with resignation, "I guess I'll see you guys later"-briefly slipping deeper into a waking dream just when he'd decided to emerge.

Braff's directorial debut falls short of its apparent ambition to be a modern-day Graduate. Like that classic coming-of-age story, Garden State begins on an airplane and proceeds through a series of scenes that have Largeman ambulating like a sleepwalker. But Dustin Hoffman's affectless character didn't simply shrug off his disaffection as soon as the right girl came along. Braff also seems to reference the work of Wes Anderson, his contemporary, who wrote and directed a new-classic coming-of-age story in Rushmore. Like Anderson, Braff fills his film with oddities and sight gags (Largeman pulls into a parking space with a gas pump nozzle sticking out of his tank; he walks past a line of sinks in a men's room and triggers, in wave-like sequence, their motion-sensing faucets). But Anderson's writing and direction is both naturally playful and stylistically seamless. In Garden State we carom from nouveau-Gothic mansion to '70s-inspired chaos at Sam's to an ark in a park to a stainless steel airport, without even a consistent color palette to connect them; and there's an ugly undercurrent to much of the humor, as when Sam exclaims over the fact that her adopted black brother, now a student at Rutgers, used to be "one of those babies with flies crawling on him." Aiming for laughs, this line and others overshot-or fell short of-their mark.