Upcoming indie film ends up a 'Gigantic' waste of time
Movie Review
Carissa Casares
Issue date: 5/19/09 Section: Entertainment
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Better known as surrealism, the genre has been around for decades and mastered by few (mainly directors such as Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Hal Ashby). Their films were ground-breaking in that, realistically, the plots didn't always make sense, but they didn't need explaining. And surrealism is like that: If done well, it's revealing and transcendental. If done poorly, it's just plain confusing.
Matt Aselton's directorial debut, "Gigantic," falls into the latter category. Aselton grapples with the idea of surrealism, trying to create a world where reality and absurdity cross to convey greater ideas of human emotions and interactions. But "Gigantic" just feels disjointed. IN the end, it doesn't add up to anything. Rather, it just feels like an odd, asinine tale that succeeds only in bringing the viewer into a theatrical world only to leave them there dazed.
The storyline goes something like this: Brian Weathersby (Paul Dano) is 28 years old. He has wanted to adopt a Chinese baby ever since he was 8 (like most children). His days are spent selling expensive Swedish mattresses and daydreaming about adopting.
One day, a loudmouth, expensive-suit-wearing businessman, named Al Lolly (John Goodman) comes in and picks out a $14,000 mattress. Later that day, Lolly sends his beautiful, though strange, daughter, Harriet (Zooey Deschanel) to complete the transaction. While there, Harriet falls asleep on one of the mattresses.
An awkward, hurried romance then ensues between Harriet and Weathersby, peppered with oddities that come along when the two characters' eccentric families get involved.
But, not included in this storyline is the "sub-plot" of the film. IN one of the opening scenes, a heavily bearded, lead-pipe-carrying homeless man (Zach Galifianakis) attacks Weathersby. The brutal, unexplained attack seems at first like a simple stroke of bad luck for Brian, who seems to roam through life with a a half-asleep glumness. But this man reappears throughout the film, each time in a different guise, only to attack the main charater viciously. You latter realize that this man is a figment of Weathersby's imagination, but every time he is attacked he walks away with actual injuries that remain on his face for most of the film. Why this man is attacking Weathersby is never explained, as part of the surrealist nature of the film, but somehow, it feels like it needs explaining.
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