Downsizing (15)
Sideways director Alexander Payne takes his interest in exploiting middle American male ennui to its literal extreme in Downsizing, a sci-fi parable in which those unhappy with their piddling little lives can improve their prospects by being shrunk to a fraction of their size.
The set-up is elegantly simple: to lessen humanity’s impact on the planet, Norwegian scientists have invented a miniaturisation process that allows people to exist in specially designed communities more or less the way they have done in the regular world, just on a smaller scale. Cut to ten years later and the technology’s possibilities have been repackaged for ordinary Americans as a kind of guilt-free, get-rich-quick scheme allowing people to live like kings in a way the could never afford to do as regular people.
Matt Damon stars as the film’s nominal, unremarkable hero, who undergoes the irreversible treatment only to discover his new life isn’t all that different from his old one, but it’s the wonderful Hong Chau as a Vietnamese dissident whose plight really brings the film alive. Too bad, then, that all narrative roads lead back to Damon. For all the high concept wonders at work, Payne can’t seem to break out of his own rut. Male self-pity is indulged once again.