Ray thinks GIGANTIC comes up a little bit short!
Ever since Little Miss Sunshine surprised the industry with a healthy box office take and a near-win Best Picture Oscar, independent filmmakers have been desperately attempting to replicate the breezy, quirky, offbeat romantic-comedy-drama that led to its success. It's gotten to the point that, what once seemed light, airy, and fun, now feels oppressively like a formula for disaster. The latest hairball of quirky nonsense, Gigantic, stars Paul Dano as a mattress salesman in New York named Brian who desperately wants to adopt a child from China. He is also attacked almost daily by a homeless man on the street, who follows him around wherever he goes. But his life is somewhat altered by the arrival of a very rich customer (John Goodman) and his beautiful daughter Harriet (Zooey Deschanel). Do they fall in love? What do you think? First time writer/director Matt Aselton has collected an impressive cast of well-known character actors to populate his film. Goodman plays Harriet's brain cancer-surviving father with just enough reality to sell his brash and slightly zany performance. Ed Asner matches Goodman's zaniness with a performance of humor and warmth that, while threatening, never tips over into full-blown irritation. Also wonderful is is Ian Roberts as Brian's loudmouthed brother John. In all, the supporting cast terrifically fleshes out this material. More disappointing are the two leads. Dano, handed the lead after his turn in There Will Be Blood, turns in a halting, annoying performance that barely registers a pulse. After his mute performance in Little Miss Sunshine and his weird, stilted performance in There Will Be Blood, his performance as Brian comes off as some sort of affectation rather than an attempt to build a character. There are corpses floating upside down in a river that would bear closer resemblance to living human beings; perhaps Dano should find a role in the next version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers... he would make a terrific pod. Deschanel repeats the same goofy, eye-rolling, cutesy-pooh shtick that she has coughed up in every role in her filmography. Deos she have any other mode? Deschanel has fallen into the same routine that ruined Meg Ryan's career in the nineties, but here it hurts even more because her character is an underwritten and annoying mess. Nothing about the character is appealing enough to justify the romance attempted here; it's almost as if Aselton expected Deschanel's cuteness to sell the role, rather than make the character a full-fledged human being. But the worst offender is Aselton's script, which throws caution to the wind and allows every sort of "wackiness" to pervade every corner of this movie's universe. So we have endless and pointless asides and unrealistic character affectations that litter the script like a tornado of garbage and overwhelm it. For example, Goodman's character cannot simply get into a car - we lies down on a bed, and the bed retracts into the car so he can lie down while he is driven around town. Deschanel is served goat meat stew at some point ( in a bit referred to constantly for five minutes), which she then throws up all over the bathroom. Asner's character makes pinatas representing famous dictators. Brian's brother spends his Tuesday afternoons getting handjobs from hookers with a group of Japanese businessmen. Brian's best friend apparently lives in a laboratory playing with rats, which then serve as meaningful subtext for the story. It's all very film school psychobabble, filled with "subtext" and "meaning" while supposedly being light and fluffy and breezy. In other words, it's complete horseshit. The film ultimately tells us nothing about these characters except their foibles and quirks. We are meant to be drawn into this wacky world of strange and interesting characters, but since none of them register beyond their cliches and tics, it all devolves into a pointless exercise just as meaningless as the title itself. The one saving grace from Aselton is his direction, which I thought sparkled at times. He has a keen eye for composition, with some nice shots accentuating the fairly flat and meandering conclusion. Perhaps next time he would better serve his talents if he stuck to directing real scripts, rather than a collection of notes from his second year film class. In other words, Gigantic is quite a bit less than that. Gigantic opens in the U.S. on April 2nd and in the U.K. on June 26th.