Brian (Paul Dano) is a single 28-year-old who sells luxury mattresses out of a sparsely furnished Manhattan loft. He likes to get together with his elderly dad (Ed Asner) and older brothers (Ian Roberts and Robert Stanton) at a forest cabin to drink shroom-enhanced tea and wander about the woods. And ever since he was a little boy, he’s dreamed of adopting a Chinese baby to call his own. He’s oh-so-very odd, and so too is Gigantic, a borderline insufferable trifle that dispenses quirkiness with its every gesture and breath. Apparently weaned on little more than Sundance-style indies, director Matt Aselton proves a prime practitioner of eccentric pap, from Brian’s first encounter with flighty, peculiar Harriet (Zooey Deschanel) – whose faux-adorable nickname is Happy, and who falls asleep on one of Brian’s establishment’s beds after coming to pick up a $14,000 mattress for her wealthy dad (John Goodman) – to a climactic family reunion, Chinese tyke included, in which Harriet is told that normality is an illusion right before she takes some whacks at a Muammar al-Gaddafi-shaped piñata.

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