Downsizing (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Downsizing (2017) – A. Payne

I love a good “high concept” film, but truly they are hard to pull off.  Director Alexander Payne (e.g., Election, 1999; Sideways, 2004; Nebraska, 2013) has as good a chance as anyone.  The trick is to have a follow-through after the fun of the concept starts to wear off.  Here, Norwegian scientists have invented a technique that shrinks people to 10 cm in height – this will solve the environmental crisis by downsizing waste as well as people.  An added benefit is that your existing savings go A LOT further.  Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig are a couple, struggling financially, who decide to get small.  (Steve Martin is nowhere in sight, BTW).  We are then shown the residential development where they can choose a mc-mansion to live in and the complicated procedure (shaving all body hair, removing fillings/teeth) is carried out, step by step.  Everything does not go to plan and we end up following Damon as he adapts to being small.  This is where the follow-through needs to happen and it isn’t as smooth or coherent as it could be; the plot takes a detour, as Damon meets a disabled Vietnamese refugee (Hong Chau) and comes to understand her ethos of charity and compassion.  Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier (!!!) are friendly (but self-serving/capitalist) little people who befriend the two.  So, the plot starts in one place and ends up in quite another.  Apparently, some viewers felt ripped off because they expected a full-fledged comedy rather than a thoughtful (though light-hearted) reflection about the environmental crisis and human nature.  Those who don’t believe in climate change wouldn’t find this appealing -- but then they wouldn’t watch a Matt Damon movie either, would they?  Damon himself may be the film’s weakest link (apparently Paul Giamatti was attached at the start – and he would have heightened the comedy of the first half, but perhaps he wouldn’t have convincingly carried the second half, which Damon does, although he’s a pretty boring everyman).  In the end, I found this enjoyable, but fundamentally disconcerting, given its premise that humans are facing extinction.  If only we really could get small…