A MINI MASTERPIECE
Matt Damon joins the tiny happy people of Leisureland, a rich Lilliputian world where there’s one VERY big catch
THE History Of Tom Thumb, the first fairy tale printed in English, was published almost 400 years ago. Yet still our imagination is stirred by the notion of tiny people.
That’s what writer-director Alexander Payne is counting on with the beguiling Downsizing. But he goes much further, delivering a razor-sharp sci-fi satire mostly aimed at American materialism, but also at humanity’s infinite capacity to warp even the best inventions by using them to service greed and cruelty.
Payne, whose previous films include the wonderful Sideways and Nebraska, is also a master at analysing the mid-life, male voyage of self-discovery. That narrative is here, too. But mostly, it’s a film about shrinking.
The technology to reduce people down to ‘0.0364 per cent of their current mass and volume’ comes from a Norwegian institute, as ‘ the only practical remedy to humanity’s greatest problem’ — that of over-population.
The institute is funded by a benevolent corporation by way of atonement for its production of mustard gas during World War I (shades of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and his lavish prizes).
As scientists unveil their amazing discovery, they explain that if enough people undergo the medical procedure to become small, the earth’s resources will last a whole lot longer.
Five years later, in the heart of middleAmerica (Payne’s home state of Nebraska), Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (kristen Wiig) are struggling to get by.
He is an amiable sort of cove, who has dealt stoically with life’s disappointments, but still lives in the house he grew up in and cannot afford to trade up. His ambitions to become a doctor were never realised, and he is now an occupational therapist.
Then he goes to a high- school reunion, attended by an old classmate (Jason Sudeikis) who has taken the plunge and gone small. This fellow now lives in some splendour in Leisureland, ‘America’s number-one micro-community’, located under a bird-proof dome in New Mexico.
Once they have seen a sales presentation of a vast, but affordable, minimansion, featuring a fleeting cameo from Laura Dern in a bath tub, Paul and Audrey decide to follow suit. Until this point, the film seems like a smart sci-fi comedy, but once the (brilliantly depicted) miniaturisation process is complete, Payne begins to steer it in unexpected new directions. Paul’s new neighbour in Leisureland is a charismatically louche Serb (christoph Waltz on top form) who knows full well that the lofty principles on which the technology was founded have themselves been shrunk. Nobody has got small to save the planet, they just want the stuff that used to be the exclusive preserve of the rich. Payne clearly intends this modern-day Lilliput to be an almost literal microcosm of America. However, the technology is being abused all around the world. Tiny terrorists are sneaking past border checkpoints eve-
rywhere, and political dissidents are being shrunk against their will. One of them is a Vietnamese amputee called Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), who shows Paul this new small-scale universe extends beyond the mansions and golf courses of Leisureland, and contains just as much deprivation and hardship as the old one.
Then, just as we are coming to terms with this rather abrupt departure from the gentle comedy of the first third of the movie, Payne changes tack again, whisking us into an existential crisis in the original mini- settlement on the banks of a Norwegian fjord.
None of these twists and turns would work half so well without Damon’s marvellous lead performance; yet again, he reminds us that he is one of the most versatile stars of his generation, just as comfortable playing alpha-male action heroes (the Bourne films) as he is villainous roles (The Talented Mr Ripley) or, as here, the kind of decent everyman James Stewart once played for Frank Capra.
But most of the credit belongs to Payne who, with his co-writer Jim Taylor, has added a strangely memorable film to his already-impressive portfolio. And one final word for the special effects; diddy people in the movies have to look realistic. Here, it’s impossible to see the join.
EARLY MAN rejoices in the join; there’s never any doubt that we’re looking at characters made out of clay.
As we brace ourselves for the usual dispiriting performance by England in this summer’s World Cup, football has at least come home in the latest work of genius by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace, Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. We might not be champions at football any more, but Britain leads the world in the business of crafting 22 clay figures and making them run around a pitch kicking a ball.
Early Man was directed by Park at the Aardman studios in Bristol, with all the wondrous expertise and staggering attention to detail for which Aardman has become renowned. And whether you like football or not, Early Man is a joy.
It tells the story of a Stone Age tribe who exist cheerfully, if somewhat stupidly, in their idyllic valley, when suddenly there is a rude interruption in the form of the sophisticated Bronze Age.
The cavemen face the confiscation of their beloved valley, not to mention annihilation and extinction, until the most resourceful of them, a youth called Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne), visits the Bronze Age town with his faithful porcine sidekick Hognob ( grunted by Park himself) and finds that the favourite leisure activity there is . . . football.
The mighty neighbours even have a team, Real Bronzio, which is managed by the rapacious Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, hilariously over- egging a French accent). The only thing Lord Nooth holds more sacred than football is bronze. He can’t get enough of the stuff. BuT
one person scares him: imperious Queen Oofeefa (Miriam Margolyes). There’s a very funny scene when he is inadvertently rude to her via a message bird (a prehistoric version of an answerphone, voiced by Rob Brydon).
Meanwhile, Dug goes back to his tribe and eventually manages to persuade the chief (Timothy Spall) there is just one way to wriggle out of their perilous situation. They must learn to play football and challenge Real Bronzio to a game, with their very survival as the prize. usefully, they have one brilliant recruit from the Bronze Age, a girl called Goona (Game Of Thrones’ Maisie Williams).
Writers Mark Burton and James Higginson, working from Park’s original story, have slipped in lots of cheeky references to the ‘Beautiful Game’. But there is so much more to savour, so much visual and verbal wit, that one viewing is really not enough.
Moreover, the stop-motion clay animation, or ‘claymation’, mastered by Park and his colleagues at Aardman has a beguilingly primitive quality that perfectly suits a prehistoric setting. Their film deserves to be a mammoth hit. A longer version of this review ran in earlier editions.