“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.

A Classic BildungsBROman

I know, Man. I feel you.

I didn’t have exactly the same problem as you, Paul Rudd. (What was your character’s name again? Ah, fuck it. Who cares.) But it was pretty close. I’ve never had a problem with having a “best friend” or a “go-to guy.” It was just that my m/f ratio was all messed up for awhile. Way too many platonic chick friends. I was the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.”

Paul Rudd, you’ve got plenty to “drink”; you’re happily engaged. You’re in love. But there’s something missing; you don’t have a man in your life. And now your fiancé’s friends are telling her that your lack of a male best friend is going to cause problems with clinginess and dependency. It’s weird because—I mean—what kind of a guy doesn’t have any real male friends? You need to get you some, Paul Rudd. And if I did it, you can do it.

Such is the premise of “I Love You, Man,” the latest successful comedy of the Apatowian Confused Boys Era. Peter Klaven (Rudd) needs a Best Man and just doesn’t know where to look.

Male bonding isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s recently been given a new name, “bromance,” and an eponymous VH1 reality show. This movie satirizes that whole potentially awkward process, the careful quickstep between “I don’t want him to think I’m a pussy” and “I don’t want him to think I’m a tool” one must perform to win quality male friends. Klaven can’t do this dance very well, as we see through his various encounters, but he knows that he has finally found a potential friend in fellow Rush fan Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), and must struggle to win him over.

The courtship, as many courtships are, is painful to watch. But because it’s these two, it’s hilarious. Rudd’s performance is genius, from his failed sobriquets (“Jobin”? Brilliant.) to his little-man stiffness. There’s no one in Hollywood better for laughing at. Jason Segal complements him well with his effortless California whimsy, but doesn’t steal the spotlight. This is Rudd’s movie, and he makes it.

This is the first movie I can remember of its kind. There have been flashes of awkward male-to-male courting before—the one springing to mind being “Tommy Boy,”—but never a movie fully dedicated to the cause. Perhaps it is the moment for it, what with the aforementioned “brocabulary,” and perhaps it is also the place. I don’t know if this comedy would work in, say, Europe, where homophobia (and sorry, but that’s at least part of what the humor is based on) doesn’t seem as pervasive, but here, where the “man date” is still a pretty funny concept, it’s good laughs.

To see a straight grown man in a cubicle pacing and rehearsing like we males (or at least this one) used to do in high school before dialing up our still-unravish’d paramours is ridiculous in itself. To know that he’s calling another straight grown man makes it all the more so.

“I Love You Man” isn’t without its peccadillos—a few too many shots of the iPhone and one dispensable scene involving animal-howling under a bridge (a scene of which some iteration seems to be present in every “boyz” movie)—but its charm is undeniable. It’s another movie that seems a little too familiar. We know these people, or we are them. Or in the case of Paul Rudd, we want to sing karaoke with them. Because Lord knows it’s hard to find a good man.