A little goes a long way, but still not far enough
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 underpinning to this oddball science- fiction concept is simple: What if you could reduce yourself to a fraction of your normal size? You’d leave a much smaller footprint, 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) learns about the downsizing process and plans to get small along with his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). They are told their modest equity of $ 152,000 will be worth $ 12.5- million on the scale of Leisureland, 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), blown up ( Brobdingnag) and even run by intelligent horses in The Land of the Houyhnhnms, a chapter that gave us the insult Yahoo.
But Payne is more interested in the details of Paul’s life; a year into Leisureworld finds him at a boring job and suffering his noisy upstairs neighbour Dusan, played by a madly grinning Christoph Waltz. He also meets Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident shrunk as part of a prison sentence, who smuggled herself to America in a TV box.
These characters, not even introduced until halfway through the film’s 135-minute runtime, represent the devil and the angel on Paul’s shoulders. Dusan has figured out that there’s a market for luxury goods in their tiny community; Ngoc Lan, who lost a leg during her flight from Vietnam, now works as a house cleaner, as well as a general Good Samaritan in the slums where she lives.
Yes, even Leisureworld has slums; they’re just much smaller. Or as Dusan’s pal and partner in crime ( Udo Kier) explains, when you get small you’re immediately rich, unless you’re poor to begin with; then you’re just small
Paul, a mighty pliable character whose course in life is constantly shifted by the winds and whims of others, gets caught up in Dusan’s schemes and in Ngoc Lan’s, the oddity being that you don’t really need to be zerofoot-five to experience any of that. Paul’s story could at this point be taking place in regular-sized Ohama 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.