This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Gigantic is the sort of kitchen sink movie many first-time directors make, mistakenly believing that they have to throw every idea they’ve ever come up with into just one film in case they never get a chance to make another. While director Matt Aselton gives us some beautiful moments, they never feel remotely related to each other or coalesce into anything worth remembering.

Paul Dano plays Brian Weathersby, a going-nowhere-fast mattress salesman who is the youngest in an unconventional family led by Ed Asner whose favorite activity is to ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms with his sons. One day, Al Lolly (John Goodman, just one of several interesting characters who arrive on the scene only later to vanish without a trace), a no-nonsense eccentric with a bad back and a lot of money, stops by to buy a very expensive bed. Al’s daughter Harriet (Zooey Deschanel) shows up later to pay for the purchase and ends up falling asleep on one of the showroom models.

Brian and Happy, as she calls herself, strike up a friendship that leads to an undefined romance of sorts until she is scared away by Brian’s obsession with adopting a Chinese baby. Or maybe she’s just afraid of love. Or maybe she’s afraid of the bruises Brian keeps bringing home every few days and the stories of a homicidal vagrant who may or may not be a figment of a never explored dementia.

Happy finds Brian fascinating, though God knows why. This is another of those movies in which one character says the inevitable line, “You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met” despite the fact that there is nothing whatsoever in the script to support the claim. Just once, I want that line to be uttered in a movie about a mid-19th century Amazon explorer who lost one of his arms to ravenous piranha and the other to pigmy cannibals and still managed to climb Mount Kilimanjaro blindfolded and backwards while wearing a tutu. Instead, it’s nearly always applied to exceedingly drab, near 30-something-year-old men wallowing in life’s doldrums and dead end jobs with absolutely zero ambition. Dano plays Brian so dull he’s nearly invisible. Deschanel at least plays Happy as someone peculiar and idiosyncratic if not outright interesting.

Is there such a thing as too quirky an independent film? If so, Gigantic is Exhibit A. It’s almost as if the filmmakers are proud of their enigmatic narrative, preferring obtuseness and perplexity to candid storytelling. Do they smirk at our lack of insight and pat themselves on the back for making a movie the vast unwashed masses “just don’t get,” or could it be that any one of Gigantic’s interesting strains should have been siphoned out and expanded into a more attentive feature rather than cramming a half dozen inert, poorly developed storylines into the same film, making for one gigantic mess?

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.