Like it or not, we unfortunately don’t get to choose our parents. The definition of family in Matt Aselton‘s Gigantic is described as a parent-adult child relationship that is beneficial, but not essential for “survival”. Despite the enormous age difference between his parents and other siblings, Paul Dano‘s the “accident of the family” character seems to benefit from the support structure that his family seems to offer and he can certainly relate to the unevenness found in the father-daughter relationship in his love interest, (Zooey Deschanel who is paired with John Goodman, who plays her eccentric in all aspects of life father), but curiously, he makes the sound choice to alter his existence and his own family experience by adopting a child of his own.
I’ve seen the picture twice now, and its definitely not your standard rom com. The exclusive clip below is a good representation of the tonal abstractness of the picture and in part, becomes part of a larger discourse on how the role of the caregiver changes over the course of time. Gigantic opens in theaters today.
