“Gigantic” needs to get a life

One look at the poster for “Gigantic” and you know what  it’s trying to be. There are tall, lank-haired Paul Dano and ostensibly pantsless Zooey Deschanel standing in a starkly furnished, sunlit apartment, staring off somewhere behind the camera, looking slightly uncomfortable.

This hipster-genius writer/director is going to show me his revolutionary vision of the nature of urban relationships through an idiosyncratic story of gangly Brooklyn twenty-somethings! And look: a solid cast. Another “Squid and the Whale” perhaps?

Nope. It’s just overwrought garbage.

Brian Weatherby (Dano) wants to adopt a Chinese baby. It has been his dream since childhood. (Fair enough.) He’s now 28, unmarried, and working on a sales floor for extremely high-end Swedish mattresses. Not the best candidate for an adoptive parent, but he’s persistent. One day, some big rich jackass (John Goodman) with a very tolerant gay assistant saunters in to buy a mattress, but leaves the actual purchasing to his daughter, Happy (Deschanel). Happy falls asleep on one of the beds when she comes to make payment, and Brian very sweetly covers her with a blanket. Later, when Brian delivers the mattress, they have sex in her papa’s fancy car. They’re smitten until Brian actually gets his adoption passed and Happy, predictably, freaks out and makes for the door.

That’s the plot. It’s not a good one, but it’s salvageable. Apparently, though, the writer didn’t think it would be enough. Soon after the opening credits, Brian is attacked by a bearded homeless guy who gives him a black eye. The same guy later appears, firing a gun at him in the woods while he’s with his father and brothers, and then appears again later, when Brian finally kills him with a sharp object and mutters an incongruous aside: “This has been going on for longer than you’d think.”

Conceded: this could easily be one of those “Dave didn’t get the hidden symbolic meaning” things. But there’s something to be said for coherence and subtlety. The flighty, lo-fi mood of this movie had no place for some unexplained quasi-Lynchian subplot ending in a dumpster-side murder. I don’t care what he’s trying to say. He needs to put a leash on his ego and say it another way.

I would see it again to try to understand it if the film weren’t so boring. A few John Goodman one-liners aside, the jokes were flat and the dialogue was forced and overwritten. One of the most entertaining parts of the film was watching Zooey Deschanel teeter all over the set in her high heels. We never learn much about her character other than that she’s capricious. Nor do we learn much about any of the other one-adjective characters. Give me another layer, Mr. Director. Or at least some nudity from closer than 30 meters. Entertain me or make your point. I’m not even asking for both.