The Garden (1990)

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

I promised my mom a good movie. she trusted me because I know much about movies. I told her 'it's a movie about the Bible, about gay men, about AIDS, about paparazzi, ...' and she said 'ow that must be a good movie'. she we went to the film museum of Brussels and we watched The Garden. how disappointed we were. how boring it was! what was Derek Jarman thinking?! I wanted to go away, but my Mom said 'no, we've paid for the tickets, so we'll sit it through'. what a mistake that decision turned out to be! now we have both more than 3600 seconds less to live. it wasn't the theme of the movie. I adore experimental movies. I'm one of those idiots that love to see the full 8 hours of Andy Warhol's Empire. but this? no, I will never ever watch a Jarman picture again. I hope you'll never do that too. because it doesn't matter who you are, where you are or what you do. this movie proves only one thing: there are still some crazy people alive that pay money for something like this. it's BEEPing boring! I saw at least one other viewer leave the museum. I saw the others getting frickin' nervous. I saw my mom staring at her watch. and how did I see this?? because the movie was BEEP! I would rather BEEP myself than watching this torment another time. how is it possible producers wanted to invest in such BEEP? it's like BEEPing BEEP! also, the rules of death are not allowed in this one, because just when you think the torture of watching it is over, another 30 sadistic minutes await you. okay, so I wrote down what I think about this movie. but you know what's really BEEPing my brains? I saw a Jarman film already! yes!!! it's true! I'm ashamed, but it's true! and I knew all Jarman films were alike. I knew it! so how the BEEP did I ever think I would do my mom a favor by taking her to The Garden? anyway, don't worry if you do like The Garden. that is possible, because I guess there really are people who'd love to stare 20 minutes at different shots from the same sky, or watching 15 minutes full of pictures of grass in different colors. and if you like it, hey man, that's cool. but it doesn't change my mind at all. I think this movie is a waste of your time.

Derek Jarman's jazzed-up home movie is very much a relic of its time. He mixes footage of his own extraordinary garden in Dungeness (one of the most remarkable & bleak landscapes in England)with dream-like re-enactments of New Testament stories given a gay spin. Church antipathy to homosexuality, the AIDS crisis, police and media brutality all spin around the screen in kaleidoscopic fashion, the images the film admits to be the dreamscapes of Jarman's own mind (he appears in his study and in his bed).The trouble with The Garden is that, although it is often visually remarkable, it is also shudderingly obvious. The scenes in which respectable old tutors bash their canes and bosh through Bibles as a boy prances on a table, or where 3 Santas homophobically abuse a gay couple, or where a camp pseudo-Pilate laughs with his minions in a sauna are all crushingly obvious pieces of public schoolboy sketch-show comedy, cut-price Monty Python skits which presume that the audience always already agrees with what is being said, so we needn't bother to argue, analyse or comprehend why. It's agit-prop at its dullest, and even Jarman's considerable abilities as a visual artist and editor can't raise this into being a work of art rather than a work of jejune satire.As for Jarman's vision of homosexuality, again he shows his class colours and sentimental bent. His gay boys are nice middle-class lads, neatly dressed and posing around like something out of Brideshead Revisited; they're very cute and noticeably silent. It's a very middle-England, excuse-making image of homosexuality, with no dissonance or awkwardness allowed, as if Jarman thought to be gay was to be a Jerome K Jerome-ish Two Men in a Boat.I suppose that the film is heartfelt and rises from a comfortable middle-class man's one piece of anger, the anger that he isn't accepted by the establishment he is a part of. It was probably necessary at the time, but it sure is a dated relic rather than the piece of masterpiece cinema his admirers might claim.

One gets the impression that other reviewers on IMDb have never seen or appreciated Jarman's other films, or any art film for that matter. This isn't for the intellectually inert. One also wonders whether they've taken the time to watch this one more than once -- its conflicted and dense, drawing on mutually contradictory sources for its symbolism, and attempting a synthesis or nexus. The main themes are religion, love, oppression, family, and above all, time. Events and elements from every era of recorded human history co-exist together in one time and interact. While much of the film itself is done in the anxious, unsteady, rapid-moving style that Jarman came to be known for, other parts are filmed with graceful panoramic transitions. Throughout all the film, landscapes are replaced with artificial projections, perhaps to give the film an aura of unreality or allegory. It is at once both scripture and pornography, philosophy and nonsense, a gloomy warning and a hopeful swansong. I believe it to be one of Jarman's most un-acknowledged films. Don't let the harsh words of bad reviewers sway you against spending an evening absorbing this film -- its mesmerizing.

This is one of Derek Jarman´s best films. I have followed Derek Jarman´s career as a film maker and the only thing I want to say is that "THE GARDEN" is one of my favourite films.