Photograph: APĪnd yet, after a thrilling twist around 50 minutes in, Downsizing loses some of its electric charge. Or perhaps more than that: a quasi-Dignitas moment, a renunciation of this “big” world, a repudiation of pride and self-love, a surrendered acceptance that one will be more happy and more useful as a tiny person. It’s an almost religious ceremony of shaving your body, removing teeth-fillings etc in a clinical white-walled facility, like preparing to join some monastic order. So is the actual preparation process that Paul and Audrey undergo. The scientific process is shown in the movie’s opening sequence, and the story of its discovery and announcement is all stunningly, eerily convincing. After some agonising, Paul and Audrey think: What the hell? Let’s do it, too. Their dollars go unimaginably further and these people live like very rich retirees while they are still young enough to enjoy it. Then a college reunion brings them face to face with a contemporary who has “downsized” to five inches with his family and gone to live in the Leisureland community of tiny people in New Mexico. Matt Damon plays Paul Safranek, an everymannish physical therapist who is reasonably happy with his life but his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) is stressed at their penny-pinching ways. It takes place in Omaha, Payne’s creative homeland of American ordinariness and nagging discontent. This long film is blisteringly brilliant for the first hour or so. My own opinion was split by the running time. Some have been restive at its vision of developing-world communities accepting charity from a white American and found the Vietnamese character to be broad and stereotypical: Ngoc Lan Tran, played by Golden Globe nominee Hong Chau. But in each of those cases, the normal-sized “big” world is perennially reintroduced to maintain the dramatic impact of littleness.
There is a tiny bit of Swift here – or The Incredible Shrinking Man, or Ant-Man, or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
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It starts out quick, sharp and funny and ends as a solemn and slow-moving leviathan: a movie overwhelmed by its own ecological and human implications, jettisoning the comedy that had been so intensely enjoyable during the opening act, in favour of a tragedy-romance of homo sapiens and a world over-populated and underprepared for the coming crisis. A lexander Payne departs, just a little, from his realist mode with this sci-fi satire about a revolutionary new micro-utopian method of shrinking human beings to matchbox size so they consume less, help the planet and boost their own consumer lifestyle in leisure-oriented downsized communities.
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