The Garden
The Garden
| 06 September 1990 (USA)
The Garden Trailers

A nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous.

Reviews
Flyerplesys Perfectly adorable
Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
mrdonleone 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.
jaibo 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.
Bjork Watching this movie gave me the feeling that I had suddenly gone insane for 90 minutes. Now I can say that some parts were merely awful while others were pretentious crap. The only things going for this movie are the presences of Tilda Swinton even though she doesn't speak, and the two leading men who were at least cute. But those points are not nearly enough to rescue "The Garden" from itself. Be warned.
kasper-3 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.