Matt Damon has a small problem
Big on premise, ‘Downsizing’ delivers very little in the end, writes
Alexander Payne has carved a space for himself as master of the world of Midwestern middle-aged American men and their midlife crises, in films such as About Schmidt, Nebraska and the similarly themed — although Hawaiian-set — The Descendants. His latest, written with longtime collaborator Jim Taylor, takes on a more Charlie Kaufman-like premise but, while it provides Payne with plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his talent for carefully observed hilarious interactions between everyday people, the overall enterprise suffers from a lack of focus and a story that fails to deliver on its intriguing premise.
In a world threatened by the effects of climate change, a Norwegian scientist, Dr Jorgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård), invents a way to shrink people, thus radically reducing their carbon footprint and creating a world where everything costs much less.
“Downsizing” becomes an increasingly attractive option for people struggling with the demands of ordinary life in the big world.
Nebraskan occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to become small people, but at the last moment Audrey chickens out and Paul is left in the downsized world, which has one drawback — you can’t reverse the process.
Stuck on his own following his divorce and having lost all the money he intended to use to live it up in mini-land luxury, Paul meets Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz), his rowdy neighbour who makes a living importing luxury goods from the real world and chopping them up into profitable segments for distribution in the small one.
He also meets Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) a one-legged Vietnamese dissident who makes a living in the shadows of the seemingly easy life of the downsizing world as a cleaner for the houses of the wealthy.
From here the story begins to flounder. It is supposed to be an examination of the perpetuation of inequality as a distinctly human trait in spite of even the most extreme imaginings, but meanders aimlessly and fails to hit any of its thematic targets.
While there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and sharply funny interactions, these do not end up making anything resembling a coherent and satisfyingly entertaining whole.
This is probably the result of Payne and Taylor’s failure to make much more of their story beyond the initial fascinating premise.
The miscasting of Damon in the lead role — a boring man in the real world who is still a boring man in the small one — doesn’t make much of a hero’s journey worth following either.
It doesn’t help that Wiig’s tremendous comic talents are completely wasted by casting her as a character who does very little for the brief time she’s on screen — and then is inexplicably cast aside very early on, never to reappear.
While Waltz provides a suitably offbeat and charming performance and is given appropriately effective oddball support by legendary German actor Udo Kier (who plays his business partner, Konrad), they aren’t the focus of the story and they can’t do enough to lift it out of its frustratingly unfocused, way-too-long and ultimately boring meditation on nothing in particular.
You could see how the elements of the idea might have excited people on paper — Payne, a darkly humorous premise, a stellar cast — but the end result is so obviously and preposterously misfired that it makes even Kaufman’s weakest film, Human Nature, look like a masterpiece.
That’s something no fan of Payne’s would ever think they would have to admit.
Downsizing is in the end a movie with a big idea that ends up being even smaller and less interesting than the lives of the people and ideas it sets out to explore.
Paul Safranek as a character certainly fits within Payne’s focus as a director over recent years — an Everyman from the middle of nowhere who has a midlife moral re-evaluation.
But, within the context of this sci-fi premise, he may have been better served by a story set in his dull, real-world reality rather than one in which nothing worth mentioning really happens.
Downsizing is on circuit.