Downsizing *** / *****
Directed by: Alexander Payne.
Written by: Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor.
Starring: Matt Damon (Paul Safranek), Christoph Waltz (Dusan Mirkovic), Hong Chau (Ngoc Lan Tran), Kristen Wiig (Audrey Safranek), Rolf Lassgård (Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen), Ingjerd Egeberg (Anne-Helene Asbjørnsen), Udo Kier (Konrad), Søren Pilmark (Dr. Andreas Jacobsen), Jason Sudeikis (Dave Johnson), Maribeth Monroe (Carol Johnson), Neil Patrick Harris (Jeff Lonowski), Laura Dern (Laura Lonowski), Niecy Nash (Leisureland Salesperson), Margo Martindale (Woman on Shuttle), Kerri Kenney (Single Mom Kristen).
Up until Downsizing, director Alexander Payne has mainly specialized in small, intimate comedies – often about lonely people on the sidelines, just trying to get in. Films like Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska. With Downsizing, Payne tries to expand that formula – make it bigger, and more all-encompassing than ever before. This is a film so full of ideas that you have to admire it for its sheer ambition. And yet, a lot of this doesn’t work. There are too many ideas floating around in the film, and none of them are really explored in any detail. The film also takes some weird turns as it moves along, and gets more confused as it does so. The basic premise of the film is that in the near future, scientists will discover a way to shrink people down, to about the size of mice. Those who choose to shrink are doing a favor to the environment – they produce far less waste – and get to live like kings, since their money goes a lot farther. Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska (of course), as an occupational therapist, and is married to Audrey (Kristen Wiig). They decide to downsize – but after Paul get the (irreversible) process done, he finds out Audrey backed out at the last minute. He was miserable in his old life, and now even more so in this one. Eventually he will meet two people that make him see things differently – his upstairs neighbor, Dusan (Christoph Waltz), and a cleaning lady, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), who was a Vietnamese dissident, who underwent the downsizing procedure as punishment for her political actions.
In many ways, Paul is a classic Alexander Payne character. He’s a white, middle aged guy from Nebraska, who feels stuck and unhappy in his life. That could describe Matthew Broderick in Election or Will Forte in Nebraska, and hey if you ignore either the location or age Paul Giamatti in Sideways or George Clooney in The Descendants or Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. Yes, Alexander Payne loves his sad sack white guys. Damon is more than capable to play one of these characters – part of Damon’s appeal is his blandness and normalcy. Yet, here, unfortunately Payne gives him both too much and too little to do. Damon has to drift from one scene to the next, and oftentimes, it feels like he’s in a different movie in each of those scenes. Yet, his character remains stubbornly bland. This may well work if those around him were more colorful, but other than Waltz, Chau and (briefly) Udo Kier, no one really makes an impression. Waltz and Kier are great fun as wealthy, Eurotrash (although in the third act when they all of a sudden have a conscience, I was confused) – but there’s not much else to them other than that.
Then there is Hong Chau as Ngoc Lan Tran. On one level, hers is the best performance in the film and the most interesting character. On the other, she is basically there to help the white guy along his path to self-realization, and speaks with a pretty offensive accent the whole way through. Enough shines through so that you can see just how talented Hong Chau is – and she really makes the character work a lot better than it has any right to – but it still remains rather offensive at times.
Through the course of Downsizing, Alexander Payne and company essentially throw everything at the wall, and see what will stick. To their credit, the film runs well over two hours, and I was never once bored by it. It has so many ideas, how could you be? And Payne, who is often criticized for not being the most visually inventive of directors, really does do some great things here. And yet, the film never really comes together, never coheres into anything. It’s a weird mishmash of everything that never quite works, even if you admire the effort.
