DAMON SEES BIG PICTURE
New details about “Downsizing,” the upcoming Alexander Payne film in which Matt Damon’s character shrinks himself, have been revealed. And from the sounds of it, we should take the flick more seriously than a corny, modernday riff on “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
Payne, who’s had the movie in the works for more than a decade, has deemed “Downsizing” his chef-d’oeuvre. He recently told Entertainment Weekly that despite the ridiculous shrinking premise and comedic cast members, the film is going to make a serious statement.
“‘Downsizing’ imagines what might happen if overpopulation and climate change (prompt) Norwegian scientists to discover how to shrink people down to 5 inches tall and propose, very earnestly, the population’s two-to-threehundred-year transition from big to small,” he told the magazine.
Basically, Payne plans to give us a reason to laugh while also secretly crying inside about hot-button issues such as immigration and human impact on the environment.
“It takes something inherently absurd and ridiculous, but tells it with utter earnestness,” Payne said. “Kind of like what you see in ‘Black Mirror.’ Some episodes of ‘Black Mirror’ take a premise and run with it, but I’m not interested in the science-fiction feeling; I always aspire to make a Hal Ashby or a Robert Altman movie.”
At this point, it’s widely assumed that Damon, Cambridge’s golden boy, and exSNL star Kristen Wiig will be playing the main roles in the movie, a married couple exploring self-shrinkage. Although their roles haven’t officially been announced.
Word is, the cast includes super-serious actors Christoph Waltz, Laura Dern and Margo Martindale. But there are also a bunch of professional goofballs acting in the flick, such as Jason Sudeikis, Neil Patrick Harris, Niecy Nash and Kerri Kenney, both of “Reno 911” fame — hardly the actors you’d expect in a deeply cerebral film full of political criticism.
“Downsizing” is slated to debut at the Venice Film Festival in late August, hitting theaters for the rest of us on Dec. 22. That timeline would make it ripe for landing in the lineup of Academy Awards contenders.
There’s nothing funny about how convenient that would be.