Centre of attention
Downsizing
Actress Kristen Wiig arrives on the red carpet for the opening ceremony of the 74th Venice Film Festival. Her film Downsizing, which premiered at the festival, also stars Matt Damon and follows a couple as they decide to abandon their stressed lives and undergo a transformation which leaves them around six-inches tall. Other highlights tipped to stand out at this year’s festival include Judi Dench in Victoria & Abdul, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and another Damon film, Suburbicon, a Coen brothers story directed by George Clooney.
Cert TBC, 135 min Alexander Payne
Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Udo Kier, Jason Sudeikis, Neil Patrick Harris, Laura Dern
‘Aperson’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film. In earlier work like Election, About Schmidt and Sideways, Payne showed a spiky penchant for making momentous life events feel like microscopic trifles, and vice versa – and this science-fiction comedy, which opened the Venice Film Festival last night, stretches that theme to its logical limits. Its picaresque – or perhaps Pixar-esque – premise is one you just have to run with. In a nearfuture, Norwegian scientists have developed a medical procedure that allows humans to shrink themselves to pocket-sized. The effects are irreversible, and the specially built walled communities for small people, with names like Leisureland and Pirate’s Cove, have a theme park-ish sheen. But the process comes with two serious benefits. Finances that were meagre in the full-sized world can stretch significantly further when it comes to luxury in miniature, while the reduced environmental impact of a six-inch-tall life means you’re doing your bit for the future of the planet.
Sustainable living with all the glitzy trappings of material success? Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) can see the appeal. A hard-working physiotherapist who’s still struggling to muster a deposit for a home of his own, he wonders if downsizing might solve all of his problems at a stroke. And his old school friend (Jason Sudeikis), who recently underwent the procedure, can’t speak highly enough of it – as highly as it’s possible to speak, that is, from ankle height.
So, Paul and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) attend a no-stringsattached seminar, where they’re finally sold on the idea, and book in for their transition. Post-procedure, there’s no turning back, and the film wallows in the couple’s apprehension – which is made cringingly palpable thanks both to Damon and Wiig’s performances and the subtle creepiness of small-world life. There is a very clever shot of Damon ambling down a long corridor at the medical facility in which he seems to be shrinking through perspective alone – and the uneasy look on Wiig’s face speaks for the entire audience.
Once the transition has taken place, Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor wring out the concept for everything it’s worth, and their plot makes so many left turns it’s easy to temporarily forget which way is forward.
The star-studded supporting cast, who nudge Paul’s life on to a series of unexpected new tracks, are all given entrances as if they’re suddenly emerging from behind the curtain at a panto – not least Christoph Waltz, who gives an uproarious turn as Damon’s neighbour, a Serbian playboy called Dusan, and Udo Kier as his improbable friend and business associate, an impeccably turned-out yachtsman.
It’s thanks to Dusan that Paul meets Ngoc Lan (Inherent Vice’s Hong Chau), a Vietnamese dissident whose turbulent life has seen her forcibly downsized by her country’s government, then smuggled into the United States with a number of other political prisoners via a cardboard box. She’s now working as a house cleaner in Leisureland’s glossier enclaves, and her friendship with Paul opens his eyes to the lives of the legion havenots he hadn’t noticed from his bubble (call it Honey, I Shrunk My Privilege).
This section feels a little wide-eyed at times, but it’s rescued from mawkishness by some well-placed jabs of dry humour and a terrifically appealing performance from Chau that complements Damon’s nicely pitched bluff affability. Their chemistry turbo-charges the film through its increasingly foreboding final stretch, in which the fate of humanity (really!) is in the balance.
Downsizing’s suggestion that a healthier world-view might only be a bizarre physical transformation away unquestionably has something of Avatar about it. But, Payne’s film thrills to the idea that it may not be such a small world after all.