Gigantic

This movie looked like it had it all: a talented cast and a quirky love story, but unfortunately it fell short of my expectations. Gigantic is about a mattress salesman Brian (Paul Dano) who falls in love with the daughter of one of his customers. Brian is a soft spoken guy drifting through life. The only thing that he feels passionate about is adopting a Chinese baby, which he has wanted to do since he was 6 years old. One day a rather large and pushy businessman (John Goodman) comes into to buy a mattress from Brian. When Brian asks abut delivery options, the businessman says he will send in his daughter to take care of those arrangements. The next day Happy (Zoey Deschanel), comes to the store, but instead of figuring out how to get the mattress home, she falls asleep. Happy is a total flake who lives with her dad, and flits from job to job. And so a very strange courting begins between Happy and Brian.

The movie just kind of goes along without any real direction as we see Brian date Happy, go with his brothers and his dad (Ed Asner) to get high in the woods, repeatedly gets attacked by a homeless man, hangs with his friend that works in a creepy rat lab and keeps calling to see if he has been approved for the adoption. Things get complicated between Happy and Brian when he finally gets approved for the baby. Happy gets overwhelmed with the prospect of an instant family (her family situation isn't exactly functional), so she starts distancing herself from Brian and claims to be leaving for Europe to go to cooking school. They break up, and in the meantime Brian gets his Chinese baby. But we obviously need a happy ending, so of course leave it to Happy to go back to Brian and embrace the family she never had.

The film did have some highlights, one being John Goodman, who was very entertaining as Happy's gruff father and contributed most of the laughs to the film. Ed Asner was also good as Brian's father, full of warmth and support. Now for the negatives, I felt that that Gigantic had too many seemingly random events that never really came together in the end, ie the homeless man escapades. Zoey Deschanel, who I usually really like, was flat. She had this annoying baby voice, and I didn't really feel that her character changed during the course of the film. Also, Happy being the walking metaphor for bringing happiness to Brian's life was a little cheesy if you ask me. I felt that Gigantic was trying a little too hard to be a different kind of love story, and ended up just being an awkward one.