Given that Alexander Payne is perhaps best known for humanist road trips across a kooky if recognisable America — About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska — it is easy to forget his 1999 calling card, Election, runs thick with satire. it’s a quality that courses through Downsizing, which adds new colours for Payne to play with. ambitious, playful, thoughtful and emotional, Downsizing takes a Pixar-level high concept — in the near future, miniaturised humans will live in small colonies to help an overstuffed planet— and mostly wrings it for comedic, political and emotional gold.
Payne is careful to plausibly set out his stall, convincingly painting the scientific and cultural growth of miniaturisation — it starts with an experiment in Norway, revealed to the world in a hilarious symposium — before altering the idea through the life of Paul Safranek (Damon), a likeable schnook with an oft-mispronounced surname, and wife Audrey (Wiig). Payne is at his most confident in the film’s early stages, mining droll, absurdist mileage from his premise. The Film takes its time on the minutiae of miniaturisation, be it the need for teeth removal or the way nurses use spatulas to scrape newly scaled-down patients off gurneys. Payne also finds fantastic details in both the ‘smalls’ in the big world (every flight feels like first class) and the big world invading the tiny community (a rose becomes a centrepiece in a small apartment).
Downsizing is that rarest of beasts — a visual effects-heavy Alexander Payne film — and for the most part, the trickery is invisible, the scales between the regular-sized and the reduced-sized not jarring at all. it gives you the hope that one day Payne might direct Ant-Man 9.
Downsizing is that rarest of beasts — a visual effects-heavy Alexander Payne film.
About a third of the way through, a curveball scuppers the Safraneks’ idyll and Downsizing goes off in a different direction. From here, the movie throws up a hedonistic party hosted by neighbour Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz on buoyant form as a European party hound, sharing an unlikely double act with Udo Kier), a delve into the miniature world’s slums and a last-act attempt to escape the end of the world. Without pretension, the film is stuffed with hot-button topics — about the lengths people will go to escape economic hardship, global overcrowding and the dangers of climate change — but never finds a way to make them coalesce. Instead, Payne concentrates on a journey back to life. While Wiig sits on her comedic chops to play a humdrum housewife, Damon is sweet and good-natured, but needs more dimensions to make him completely compelling.
In fact, Damon is eclipsed by Hong Chau as a dissident Vietnamese refugee-turned-philanthropist, injured by entering America in a TV box, who arrives in Paul’s orbit. She begins the movie as Asian Stereotype 101, but grows to become the heart of the film. It’s a terrific performance. And her line reading of the phrase “love fuck” is one of the first delights of 2018.
