I have never spoken to Zach Braff. I have never seen him outside my TV screen or movie theater. But I am beginning to wonder if he has been secretly recording my conversations.

I’m sure he has no idea who I am. He probably has never been within 100 feet of me. But the strange thing is, as I sat down to watch The Last Kiss, I could not help but feel like Braff had been sitting next to me after watching Garden State, listening to why I just couldn’t embrace it in the way everyone else had, and two years later telling me that he agreed.

I won’t deny it, I have watched Garden State since it came out on DVD. It is cute and sometimes authentic in a way that can put smile on your face. But my problem has always been its ending. Its smiley face sense of peace and contentment. The boy meets girl, happily ever after, nothing else matters pathway that I just have never been able to watch with out a sense of syrupy falsehood making me sick to my stomach.

Call me a pessimist, but if life is going to be either one stop perfection or complete failure, I have got to say to that to believe in the former would almost let me down more than knowing that the latter happens more often than not.

Which leads me to The Last Kiss. Not exactly Garden State II, but as I see it, the perfect follow up to the unrealistically happy Garden State ending that I just could not buy.

While Garden State was about finding happiness and contentment in what may sometimes seem like a sea of vast nothingness, The Last Kiss is about realizing that one turn towards happiness and contentment is not equal to an effortless happily ever after.

As the movie opens, Braff’s Michael seems to have it all. He has a stable job as an architect. He has a car. He has a house. He has what seems to be a highly functional relationship with a beautiful girlfriend who adores him. He has a group of loyal friends who are always there for each other. And he is going to be a father.

If there is a recipe for happily ever after, he has all the standard ingredients. But as the movie shows us, just because happy is there, does not mean it’s a free ride.

Jump to the possibility that we have filled our “happy” slots with the wrong choices. Enter the harsh reality that we just may not be able to live up to the “happy” certainty we see laid out before us. Turn around and face the ugly possibility that even the most positive values and institutions we have pursued all our lives may not even be real.

For Michael it is about the girl. About love and marriage and being a father and forever. It is about his friend who can’t stop loving a woman who will never love him back. It is about another friend who cannot even remember what love is even as he sits across from the woman of his dreams and their son. It is about his soon to be in-laws who have been married since their youth but questionably content for an unknown number of years. It is about the flirty brunette who is freedom and options and the scary possibility that every choice he has made so far is completely wrong. In a world where the word love is tossed around as casually as the daily paper, it as about actually believing that love is something bigger, something that is real, and something that by its nature rises above whatever the real world may send its way.

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