Keeping it Reel: "Gigante"

Any master storyteller knows bringing your audience in so close that you can almost feel them sitting on your lap is the hallmark that you've crossed the divide separating you from them. That intimacy is the biggest luxury artists and writers have, something lost in the sensory experience we have as moviegoers. It's a closeness we don't feel watching speeding images projected onto a large screen in quite the same way that we sense a closeness to characters brought to life through a book that's inches from our very face. We breathe them in, like we do the smell of ink and paper, holding a physical object in our hands, in a scale that's designed especially for our senses. The slow crafting of a story produced from the pacing of a book gives our human brains a time frame we can easily adjust to, turning pages slowly (or not), maybe going back to reread something again just to get it right in our head, or pausing to ruminate on the picture the author has just created that illuminates something in way previously unknown; it's that loving lingering that give t.v. shows and movies cause for frustration in hardcore book people like myself.

The director has already called the shots, creating their own world from words made precious in our minds through time, the way books and stories become. We get tripped up by niggling details like the anachronism of an actors' bad hairdo, let alone big story elements like time and space. That suspension of belief is the bane of many a lesser talents existence. It's what every classic, timeless, great story hangs upon; the ability for me to hold you right in the palm of my hand, where I need you to be, so you can take in the story richly from every angle, drinking it in, letting it soak into you, so that the story also becomes a part of you. Some people have it, some people spend years chasing it, some people try to learn it, and the rest become our wonderful audience who we spend our lives wooing in a necessary dance that exists between the creator and the viewer.

The freedom we give a reader to transpose what we've written or drawn into their own imaginative spaces is something that a t.v. director can't do, because they have to "draw" a character and tell a defined story in a half an hour. It's really hard. Books also have the same deadline. We must make something to print on the presses, and the edition that lives on your shelf is semi-permanent, at least until we reprint it and possibly revise it, just like a film is "cut" and released; the story stays that way until somewhat remakes it, which is way more expensive than reprinting a book. Genres are troublesome, too. I hate romances for the exact reasons I outlined above: I simply don't buy it. Love is something best left to poets, because it's like trying to explain the color purple to a blind person. What does color mean to them? I've seen a few really good adaptations of books to movies, but it's something best left to a truly gifted artist. Maurice Sendak wisely advised Spike Jonez to make his own Wild Things instead of trying to lavishly re-create his work into a movie, a world made specifically for children as a book, functioning best on the level it was designed for, and he spoke like a true master. The formats are too different to reconcile the gap that exists.

So when I see movies that have characters who feel so real, I actually know people just like them, it's a rare experience. I found this gem of a movie called Gigante that's the most flawlessly real depiction of actual human love than any other movie I've seen about it. There's just no false notes or wrong moves, because every heart-wrenching scene feels exactly like a young man crushing hard and falling deeply in love. There's no bullshit CGI effects, no bombastic declarations delivered hammily or wildly desperate acts for her attention (because our hero is very shy around his lady love), nor fake showiness of his affections. This is a real story that takes place in a real world you know exists, because it's the same thing that's happened to you. He's an average guy (but not to us), working cruddy minimum wage jobs for a buck (just like we have), falling in love with an average girl (but not to him, because she's his whole world), who gets mistreated because they don't love her like he does (or we do). It's that perfect.

Yeah, I know.