A real downer

Alexander Payne’s Downsizing doesn’t live up to lofty expectations

It makes sense that Norwegian scientists would be the ones to perfect a way of scaling humans down to about 12 centimetres tall. After all, their Swedish neighbours gave us Ikea (furniture in tiny packages), while the Danes created Lego — tiny models of everything.

The philosophical underpinning to this oddball sciencefiction concept is simple: What if you could reduce yourself to a fraction of your normal size? You’d leave a much smaller footprint on the Earth, ecologically speaking. And your current wealth would multiply, given that you’d need so little in the way of resources to live.

But in the hands of director Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Descendants), this wonky, Swiftian satire takes a few somewhat banal turns. Rather than a fully fleshed-out tale, we wind up with a collection of three closely linked short stories.

In the first, Omaha Everyman Paul Safranek (Matt Damon, light years away from Jason Bourne) learns about the downsizing process and plans to get small along with his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). They are told that their modest equity of $152,000 will be worth $12.5 million on the scale of Leisureland Estates, a dollhouse community for the newly small.

Payne takes great pains to describe the ins and outs of the process, from dental work (your fillings don’t shrink, so they need to come out before you downsize) to the logistics of moving. Paul and Audrey fill a box with wedding rings and other keepsakes; it will arrive at their new home in Leisureland, seemingly as big as a shipping container.

Jonathan Swift plumbed these waters 291 years ago in Gulliver’s Travels, a tale that made fun of the human condition by showing society scaled down (in Lilliput), made bigger (Brobdingnag) and even run by intelligent horses in The Land of the Houyhnhnms, a chapter that gave us the insult and future search engine name Yahoo. But Payne is more interested in the small details of Paul’s life. A year into his time at Leisureland, Paul has a boring job and a noisy upstairs neighbour Dusan Mirkovic, played by a madly grinning Christoph Waltz. He also meets Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident who was shrunk as part of a prison sentence and smuggled herself to America inside a TV box.

These characters, not even introduced until halfway through the film’s 135-minute run time, represent the devil and the angel on Paul’s shoulders. Dusan has figured out there’s a market for luxury goods in their tiny community; Ngoc Lan Tran, who lost a leg during her flight from Vietnam, works as a house cleaner and is a Good Samaritan in the slums where she lives.

Paul, a mighty pliable character whose course in life is constantly shifted by the whims of others, gets caught up in Dusan’s schemes and in Ngoc Lan’s dreams; the oddity being that you don’t really need to be zero-foot-five to experience any of that. Paul’s story could at this point be taking place in regularsized Omaha or a domed Martian colony, for all it matters to the plot.

And thus we come to the final act, which involves a trip to Norway and a meeting with the scientist (Rolf Lassgård) who started the whole downsizing trend.

It adds a philosophical twist to the environmental message implicit in the downsizing process, but is perhaps better left for viewers to discover in more detail. Suffice to say it feels like an underwhelming final note in Payne’s concerto.

Audiences may, perhaps not surprisingly, leave Downsizing wanting more.