We’d walk a long way to see either Paul Dano or Zooey Deschanel on a screen, so Gigantic ought to have us cheering ‘Together at last’. Alas, this first feature from commercials sector graduate Matt Aselton works the most irksome tics and excesses of indie schmindie cinema into one unimaginably irritating package. That’s right, folks. Gigantic, a film that largely takes place in an ironic mattress shop, is even more annoying than the sum of its parts.
There are familiar slacker idioms from the get-go. The hero, Brian (Paul Dano), has a friend in an animal behaviour lab who provides sub-Apatow lad banter and the wisdom that comes from watching rats run mazes. Brian’s dad (Ed Azner) and brothers enjoy mushroom hunting trips. And so on.
The quirks keep on coming; Brian is periodically stalked by a wild homeless guy (Zach Galifianakis, the funny one from The Hangover). The filmmakers cannot have known that this particular subplot would end up looking like a poor cousin of Family Guy’s giant chicken gag.
These are but tangents in the grand scheme of things. Gigantic is, at heart, a cutesy pie love story between Mr. Dano’s bed salesman and an eccentric heiress (Zooey Deschanel). She’s one of those improbably rich New Yorkers one tends to find in Woody Allen films and JD Salinger short stories and she comes replete with her own set of quirky associates, most notably her dad, a weird old buzzard with a bad back played by John Goodman.
Anyways, it so happens that Brian is in the process of adopting a Chinese baby, a lifelong ambition that may come between him and newly found uptown girl. You won’t really care.
Gigantic’s leftfield leanings might have been forgivable if the dialogue wasn’t so painfully slow. But this film is far too caught up in medium shot tributes to Antonioni to notice that everything else has gone south. Diabolically dull.