REVIEW: Boring lead makes messy movie worse

"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 ingesting 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), who calls herself Happy, shows up later to pay for the purchase and ends up falling asleep on one of the showroom models.

Brian and Happy 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 pygmy cannibals and still managed to climb Mount Kilimanjaro backward, blindfolded and wearing a tutu.

Instead, it's nearly always applied to exceedingly drab, near-30-year-old men wallowing in life's doldrums and dead-end jobs with zero ambition.

Dano plays Brian so dully that 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 were proud of their enigmatic narrative, preferring obtuseness and perplexity over 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 story lines into the same film, making for one gigantic mess?

GIGANTIC

Cast: Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman, Ed Asner, Robert Stanton
Director: Matt Aselton
Theater: Kimball's
Rated: Rated R (for language, some sexual content and violence)
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

GRADE: C