Gigantic
Year: 2009
Director: Mike Aselton
Studio: First Independent Pictures
Stars: Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 98 Mins
Official Website: http://www.thegiganticmovie.com/




“Gigantic” recently premiered in New York, yesterday. The film is about a mattress salesman (Paul Dano), who desperately wants to adopt a Chinese baby. Then one day, he meets a young woman (Zooey Deschanel), who has a potty mouth. The saleman begins to fall for this young woman. To finally have her, he must compete with her art-collecting father (John Goodman) that has a bad back and deep pocket for her and deal with his eccentric parents while waiting for the call about his adoption.

I was really looking forward to “Gigantic”, because of it’s stars Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel. After watching this film, I was very disappointed, at the fact that this should have been a good film.

The reason this film should have been good, the performances and the direction were good enough. Co-writer and director, Matt Aselton does a very good job with his direction. I liked how, he makes most the scenes seem very weird, like the first time that the two main characters meet at the mattress shop and one of them fall asleep for a couple of hours or the fact that John Goodman’s character has to lay down in the truck of the family’s car, everytime he goes out. Scenes like that make a film like this, different and not so grossed-out, like other comedies. The acting was also good here, as I have no problem with the performances here. I though the chemistry, between Dano and Deschanel was very good, as they kept my interest, for most of this film. Also, it was nice to see Ed Asner get some work, as he has appeared such films and television programs, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Disney’s upcoming 3D movie “Up”. He’s very good everytime he appeared on screen, as the performance helped me get though some of the dull moments that film has.

This film ultimately fails in the end, because of its screenplay, which was written by Aselton and Adam Nagata. There were two reasons to why this screenplay and film fails. First, there are noticeable flaws in this screenplay that takes this film off track. Every time this became interesting and fun, the whole subplot, with the homeless man slows this film down and it become very dull to watch. The reason for this is simple; the character felt out of place, as it made no sense with the tone and development that was going on. That’s when this film became very dull. Everytime that character came onscreen, the movie stopped doing the positive things that it was achieving with the development of the relationship and the film’s tone. It hurts the tone of the film, especially in the last act.

The other reason for why this film does not work, there really wasn’t much conflict between Dano and Goodman’s character. In order for comedies to work there has to be some sort of conflict, where the two characters that you think are going to have problems, do. There really wasn’t much of this here, as the writers had opportunities, where they could generate some conflict over Deschanel’s character, but I didn’t get the sense that there was any here. They missed the boat there, as there could have been some humorous moments with the two, but there was none.

“Gigantic” is a disappointing film that should have been good, if it wasn’t the fact that this film has a flawed screenplay, along with miss opportunities to generate some humor and interesting conflict. The film is now playing in New York and will hit Los Angeles on April 17th

Review Rating: 2.5 Stars