Just a silly little love story
SHRINKING people to save the planet from destruction — it’s an interesting science fiction-fantasy idea. We’ve already seen people getting “downsized” in the movies, Alice In Wonderland and Beetlejuice Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and “upsized” Gulliver’s Travels.
In Downsizing, scientists have come up with the miraculous method of shrinking people to a mere 12cm tall, just to spare the world an ecological disaster. It’s hailed as a cure-all for a world ready to burst at its seams with humans, garbage, plastics, and what have you. It’s “the one practical, humane, and lasting solution to humanity’s greatest problem”.
But when Paul (Matt Damon) and wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) get to the point of taking that shrinking plunge, the spiel is instead on how much more they would gain in terms of material wealth. Diamonds and pearls, costing only some tens of dollars, or that many-roomed mansion with pool, because they will be really tiny, hence, really cheap.
Paul goes ahead with the shrink but Audrey backs out. He wakes up alone, and now has to live in Leisureland — a biodome. Things get more exciting for everyone when a wheeling-dealing Dusan (Christoph Waltz) turns up in Paul’s life — right when he’s trying to get it on with a date.
Dusan isn’t into the existential crisis of Man and the Environment; he’s more into how to make downsizing a mega business for himself. And he really knows how to party like Hugh Hefner, if you get my drift.
Paul, being a bit of a wimp, gets back to work as an occupational therapist, and helps a one-legged Vietnamese refugee, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a minipolitical activist who was downsized and now is a house help. (There are even terrorists who have been forcibly downsized!)
Soon, he discovers a shantytown filled with tiny refugees and the poor, and he likes it more than his gated community. I don’t know how he ends up being the Viet’s handyman, but it could be that she has the most forceful personality of the entire miniature ensemble. There’s one scene where Paul wants to go to Norway, to meet the scientists behind the shrinking, and he sits with Dusan to explain to her why he needs to go alone. She has none of that, because Paul owes her, big-time, due to a twist of fate.
So they go together and meet mini people who want to set a home beneath the seas, where they hope to wait out the ecological death and be there for the renaissance of the planet.
At its heart, and here’s where Payne missed out, the movie is a romantic tale of a jilted husband who finds someone who changes his perspective on life, and they live
happily ever after in Mini-Land. But this is muddled with a cheap satire on today’s wants and needs.
It gets worse — the Viet played by Hong Chau is so stereotyped, anyone in Asia can see her in themselves, or next door. Her character is honest, and blunt, with Chinese-sounding accented English. It’s like watching all the Hawaiian cops in Hawaii 5-0 become the heroes, and not Steve McGarrett.
Downsizing is not a deep look at society,
The Square; it’s just a silly love story.
nstent@nst.com.my