Matt Aselton’s auspicious little indie comedy “Gigantic” has received surprisingly little attention and mixed to poor reviews, but it boasts an impressive cast that includes Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander, Clarke Peters and Zach Galifianakis. The quirks are evidently getting on many people’s nerves, but we think it’s a refreshing picture with strong performances and quite an elegant visual style. We caught up with Aselton and Dano in New York last week and discussed the film and how it’s being received.
Dano stars as Brian, the youngest son of much, much older parents (played by Asner and Alexander). He’s a casually shiftless young man who works at a high-end mattress warehouse and is attempting to adopt a Chinese baby–both details inspired by Aselton’s life. Throughout his childhood his younger brother urged the family to adopt a Chinese infant so that he would no longer be the youngest, which also tied into a sort of Western idea about Chinese black market babies.
“It was a time, when we were growing up, that apocryphal or not, there were stories about China and if you read about the subject it’s still there…about families that have more than one baby and the folklore was pretty strong…so I think that’s where that comes from,” Aselton said.
As for the Swedish mattress emporium, the director noted, “I was walking down Fifth Avenue one day and I stumbled into this place and I had no idea that there were twenty thousand dollar mattresses and…what was interesting to me about the experience is that I went in there and it seemed like the easiest place in the world to hang out just lying on beds and we wanted that scene for [Deschanel] to show up… as an indicator about her personality.” Perhaps this is why the film feels so intensely intimate and vague: because Aselton is mining his everyday existence to bring it to life, but isn’t quite spelling any of it out.
Of course, there is always the risk that a movie about a less-than-satisfied twentysomething will end up as mere cliché. It has become disturbingly common for anyone with a Paxil prescription and a word processor to churn out a script with a mopey hero complaining about his sad-sack life. Here “Gigantic” succeeds most remarkably, since you never get the feeling that these characters are meant to be pitied (or even that they pity themselves).
“It’s kind of dangerous territory, depression, ’cause there’s been a lot of [these films] made,” Aselton said of one of the film’s themes. “You could either spend thirty minutes with Paul’s character walking around taking Zoloft and saying ‘Woe is me’ and talking about it or you could show him looking at lab rats and thinking about big questions or whatever. ” In fact, Dano’s character doesn’t really get much chance to complain about anything as he is oddly isolated from everyone in his life until he meets Deschanel. This was quite intentional the filmmaker insisted.
“Paul’s character doesn’t really have any peers. The hard thing that I find about movies featuring people in their twenties is… they’re all saying the same thing so I didn’t want him to have any friends. I wanted him to have odd relationships with people who were outside of his set or older.”
Also crucial in making this film more than just an also-ran indie flick was the almost meta-film aspect of the storytelling. In a lot of ways, “Gigantic” feels far more literary than visual. The film begins in the middle of these characters’ lives–in fact, it begins in the middle of the story itself. It also refuses to offer easy answers or wrap everything up with a nice bow at the end for the audience. The writing carries as much of the weight as the cinematography and the entire film has a disjointed, Raymond Carver-esque feel.
“I did want it to feel more like a novel,” Aselton said. “A least the story itself to have that kind of ‘We don’t really know what’s going on fully here…’ [feel] and the way it’s told, there’s not a lot of transitions. My opinion on [scenes] is generally get in late and leave early, you don’t need to tell me everything about the world, I can figure it out.” Like many recent ambiguous indies, the film requires that the viewer bring more than a desire to occupy a seat inside of a darkened cineplex for two hours. If some reviewers have been less than kind, perhaps this is why. Oh and of the overused word issues at any not-quite-mainstream comedy? “I think the word ‘quirky’ in general gets tossed around and it’s lazy and it’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s quirky.'”
The good news, however, is that the movie has been finding a home amongst viewers. “Certainly a younger audience than I thought,” the director said, ” I feel like the audience it appeals to is a twenties and thirties audience, for reasons that now when I see it make sense.” Certainly the themes that the film explores–alienation, family, boredom and the search for love–are resonant with Americans who came of age during the Clinton years and have inherited a less idyllic country. Beyond the more obvious thematic draw, though, this movie is beautifully childlike in its scope. To that end, Aselton remarked on the significance of the film’s title. “This idea kept coming up of ‘gigantic’ because I think it’s a childish word, to describe something as ‘gigantic’ and that sort of appeals to the innocence of things. Also, in the title sequence we’re looking back at Manhattan and we wrote ‘Gigantic’ very small against the city skyline and that’s how you feel when you live here sometimes, that the whole city is bigger than you.”
Actor Paul Dano was largely instrumental in making this film happen. Credited as an executive producer, Dano and his involvement was what reportedly drew many of the other actors to the project, filling him with what he termed some amount of “dread at the approach.” Dano claimed he was looking for something a little lighter after “There Will Be Blood” and was drawn to the “small heroism” of the character in “Gigantic,” saying that he takes projects because “I have to be responsible for what I do. I want to be the kind of actor where I still like myself.” And what would this well-respected young actor be doing if he weren’t making dynamic and moving films? “Farming sounds pretty good, actually.”