The Gigantic Mr. Anderson

If for his next film, Wes Anderson were to suddenly drop the motif of refined preciousness that has increasingly dominated his oeuvre, instead returning to the disconcerting tone of oddness that characterized his debut Bottle Rocket, the result would be nearly identical to Gigantic.

A low-budget indie by newcomer writer/director Matt Aselton, Gigantic stars Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel as a thoroughly baffling young couple attempting to make sense of their burgeoning romance and disparately erratic families. Like Anderson's films, Gigantic frequently portrays individual and family dysfunction as whimsical and comedic.

More to the point, the film features two versions of Anderson's typical fiercely outspoken, rebellious father figure characters (e.g. Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou). John Goodman appears first as Al Lolly, a profane, fast-talking art collector who insists on being driven around Manhattan lying down in the back of his station wagon due to chronic back pain. When he sends his daughter Harriet, aka Happy (Deschanel) to finalize the deals of a $14,000 mattress purchase, she encounters reticent salesman Brian Weathersby (Dano), about to embark on a trip to Vermont for his father's 80th birthday.

Sentimentality gives way to surrealism, as the elder Mr. Weathersby's birthday tradition actually consists primarily of a communal mushroom trip/hunt with his adult sons in the Vermont backwoods. Refreshingly, there are no outlandish special effects on display here to cheapen this experience- the viewer relies instead solely on the actors to convey 'shoom-induced feelings of wonder and confused. Yet even without psilocybin, Papa Weathersby is often confused about the age he is living in- requesting bourbon and the domestic services of a (secretary) girl in a modern day cubicle.

Thus, the same Andersonian assumption that eccentricity accompanies age and privilege is on full display here. The most awkward, unexpected and disjointed conversations occur in the spaces of greatest luxury- downtown lofts, a fully furnished cabin, high-priced restaurants, a special message parlor etc. While it is never made explicit, it is fairly evident that money buys one the ability to act outlandish without very many legal or social repercussions.

Animating all the proceedings is a firmly American upper-class sense of entitlement- to have one's thoughts expressed aloud, no matter how convoluted, and one's voice heard above the public din, no matter how small and selfish. Even Dano's comparatively humble mattress salesman feels entitled enough to seriously desire adopting a Chinese baby at age 28 (although his reasons are presumably less superficial and disagreeable than those of some certain high-profile celebrity mothers).

The film is unabashedly sexier and more sexually explicit than any of Anderson's, including the over-hyped appearance of a "nude" (backside only) Natalie Portman in the Hotel Chevalier short film opening to The Darjeeling Limited. Loly parades around her father's loft in short, revealing lingerie. At her invitation, Weathersby and her fuck for the first time in the back of her father's car while he is receiving chiropractic treatment. When they are finished, it looks as though she is pulling back on thigh-highs. The couple proceed to go skinny-dipping in a university pool on their second date, with Deschanel exposing her breasts. If not reality, all of this is a welcome dip in explicitness that is sorely lacking from Anderson's style.

But it is in unflinching portrayals of mental disturbance and violence that make Gigantic really more than a rip-off of Wes Anderson's current pampered, frilly cinematic world. Sure, suicidal tendencies appear prominently in several of Anderson's works, but never have they manifested themselves with the kind of gory entropy that is evident in this film. Self-destruction is actually personified here as a sadistic "homeless person," Weathersby's ominous bearded stalker (Zach Galifianakis, appearing as one of the leads in the hotly anticipated summer comedy The Hangover), a figure who may or may not even be real. To refer back to Dano's high-profile film by a different Anderson, "there will be blood," and not just a little bit of it, either.

Viewers looking for a reprieve in the flighty, wide-eyed Zooey Deschanel will be similarly disappointed, as although her character here begins innocent enough, it is obvious, after a graphic scene of vomiting and various scenes of crying and implied trysting, that she too has some serious mental and emotional issues going on. We get a slice of Happy's biological mother over the phone, drugged out of her wits in a cold marble condo in "Taos...wait, Florida," which tells us a little about her daughter's background, but not enough to explain everything.

But that's where Gigantic works best, I think, -in its cryptic treatment of these characters. The viewer is almost never certain what is going on inside anyone's head, perhaps least of all, the director's. What to make of the title, for example? Nothing in this film, outside of John Goodman, is really all that gigantic. There is a loose motif of lab rats swimming for their lives vs. "resigning" to their fates and drowning, repeated in the skinny-dip and Weathersby's fights with his stalker, but the film ends on a conspicuously dry, happy and sentimental note. Such deliberate obfuscation of message and abrupt change in tonality probably doesn't resonate with the majority of moviegoers, but this is an indie film, so it doesn't have to. I found Gigantic to be an intriguing and promising work from a new director, even if it is a little too dependent on Wes Anderson for its themes.

In Sum: Fucked-up, funny and sexy, but slow-burning and clearly influenced by Wes Anderson, Gigantic is a worthy endeavor from a first time writer/director.