I enjoyed Gigantic in spite of it containing seven elements
that I hate. So I guess I was either in a good mood when I saw it, or,
I don’t know, perhaps I drink too much.
This is one of those indie movies about a strange and affectless
young man (Paul Dano) who meets a zany girl who’s beautiful and full of
life (Zooey Deschanel), and then love ensues in its kooky way. So,
basically, it’s a Zach Braff film. Which is not a compliment. Further,
the love thing happens so oddly that it’s hard to believe it’s love
that they’re feeling: When Brian (Dano) meets Happy (Zooey), she asks
for his help driving her father (John Goodman) to the doctor’s office.
While they sit in the waiting room reading magazines, Happy asks,
“Would you be interested in having sex with me?”
Brian responds in the affirmative, and they go out to her dad’s
station wagon and perform the act. Now, this sounds like fun, and
Deschanel is attractive enough that, if she asked for it politely, she
would no doubt receive groin-to-groin attention from pretty much
anyone. But two scenes later, they’re at dinner with her father, and
they seem to be boyfriend and girlfriend, even though their only
encounter was a single car-fuck in a dirty parking lot.
Whatever. Kids today, right? But the relationship is never developed
onscreen; there’s no scene of them getting more than 6 inches deep with
each other, so when the inevitable boy-girl difficulties arise, it’s a
little unbelievable that they take it so hard, or start talking about
love, or do anything besides place their mouths on each other’s
genitals.
So that’s three of the elements I hate (affectless young man, magic
pixie-dust girlfriend who pretty much falls out of a cloud and lands on
his erection, and major unmotivated plot point).
But then Gigantic has some really good stuff, too. Like, Dano
and Deschanel are both interesting character actors. I don’t buy them
as real people, but that’s not the point; they put on entertaining
performances. Dano was amazing in There Will Be Blood, and
supplied the titular blood. He plays a very similar part in
Gigantic, with the same stiffly pausing speech—but with
the film set in modern-day New York, he seems especially weird, which
is an engaging choice.
Deschanel turns up in the magic-girlfriend part that Natalie Portman
plays in Garden State (and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary and etc.), but
actually has some story points of her own. Though the character is
surreal, the script treats her as a whole being, and that’s at least
mildly refreshing. She even gets to make decisions that run contrary to
the wishes of the male lead, which is also unusual. Still, she’s mostly
there as wish-fulfillment. I mean, she starts off by propositioning
Dano, and on the prettiness scale, she has him beat by exactly three
orders of magnitude. So that’s the fourth annoying element.
Further, writers Matt Aselton and Adam Nagata thought they had to
weird up Dano some more, so they have him trying to adopt a Chinese
baby, which wouldn’t be so odd except that he’s a single man, and he’s
wanted to adopt a Chinese baby since he was 10. Dano’s performance is
already so mannered that adding in the Chinese-baby quirk is like
dressing him up in a Joker costume. So I guess that’s thing I hate no.
5: writing in an artificial quirk to make a quirky character
stereotypically quirky instead of naturally quirky.
But all of that gets ameliorated to some extent by an odd subplot:
Every few weeks, a homeless man (Zach Galifianakis) shows up to assault
Dano, who crumples and submits. Then, unfortunately, there’s a sequence
where Dano’s friend, a neuroscientist, talks about how certain rats
just surrender more quickly than others, lacking the will to struggle
on. Obvious metaphor would be the sixth thing I hated about this
film.
The final element of awful occurs at the end, and I don’t want to
give anything away, but, basically, there’s no ending. Things wrap up,
but not in any satisfying way. And not in an
unsatisfying-and-that’s-the-point sort of way, either. Stuff just
basically works out.
Still, nonetheless, and however, I didn’t hate it. It’s weirdly
shot; the script doesn’t always fail; and it’s almost summer, so what
else are you gonna do?
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.