Pretty Good

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

Some people live, and many others are just jealous vultures.The pictures and metaphors are made with a edge of a blade. Two kind of life are represented, and the cyclic way of life is very well pictured. I've seen a film on the modern times that have the same intensity is the film by Serge Reggio and Philip Glass (there is no words, pictures speak their selves), it's Koyaanisqatsi. The recurrent anachronisms are well interesting too, because all this theater is eternal. This paradox asks some real questions about the times we are living, and all illusion that suits. The way we lead our life, is the time we give themselves to be free.

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.