Review: Downsizing

Downsizing (15)

Norway/USA 2017 135 mins  Dir: Alexander Payne Cast: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig

Sideways and The Descendants writer/director Alexander Payne’s venture into science fiction promised to be an irresistible blend of Swiftian satire and Philip K. Dickery with a dash of The Truman Show. It starts out cleverly enough, setting out its audacious premise with plenty of wit and style. The twists and turns that ensue are certainly unpredictable. But by the time we reach the bongo-playing New Agey hug of an ending, the inescapable feeling is that Payne has squandered a great idea.

It begins at a Norwegian scientific institute, where the boffins have perfected a technique to shrink humans to just 12cm tall and 18g in weight. Their achievement is announced at a Human Scale and Sustainability Conference and swiftly seized upon as a practical and humane solution to overpopulation, with an envisaged 200-300 year global transition from big to small. Soon the first planned and protected Lilliputian communities are established, with hundreds of people producing just a single bin bag of disposable waste in a year. But these early adopters of the littling process are actually attracted less by environmentalism than by the desire to live a luxurious life of leisure that they could never afford in the big world. Their assets are worth 100 times what they were, and everyone resides in mansions with hot tubs.

Enter Paul Safranek (Matt Damon in the paunchy, downtrodden everyman schlub mode he last essayed in Suburbicon), a discontented middle-aged occupational therapist who never achieved his ambition to become an anaesthetist and has only just paid off his student debt. Life’s a struggle for middle-class Paul and his wife Audrey (Wiig), who craves a bigger home. So they take a tour of Leisureland – “Where the grass is greener” – and after a brief mandatory counselling session, during which it’s explained that the process is irreversible (once you’re shrunk, you can never be embiggened again), the couple sign up for cellular reduction. This proves to be an undignified process during which every last tuft of  body hair is shaved off, an enema is administered, and all teeth are removed (to stop your head exploding, obviously) to be replaced by new tiddly ones on the other side

So there’s a catch, right? There’s always a catch. The film hints darkly at tensions between the big world and the little one, with downsizing being used to facilitate people smuggling and the suggestion that little people should only have a fraction of a vote, since it’s the big ‘uns that do all the work. But before long the whimsical satire veers off in an idiosyncratic if much less satisfactory direction, in which sad sack Paul learns to be a better person in trad inspirational movie style. Along the way, he encounters self-centred playboy and party animal Christoph Waltz on fine wolfish form and – no kidding – a shrill, hard-bitten unipedal Vietnamese dissident (Thai actress Hong Chau, who had a small role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice). She gets some of the film’s funniest lines, notably her description of the “eight kinds of fuck”. Trouble is that by this stage the film’s scope has shrunk almost as much as its protagonists.