DOWNSIZING – Review

DOWNSIZING, the latest from writer/director Alexander Payne, begins as a satirical comedy then halfway through, veers off into a darker, more serious story tackling issues such as immigration and the environment. Your enjoyment of the film may depend if you find this direction the film takes intriguing. If you don’t, you’re in for a long two hours and fifteen minutes, but I liked where it went. The dialogue is written with wit and romance and it’s a story I had not seen before. DOWNSIZING is not entirely successful, but it is new and fresh and ambitious, not shy of taking chances and with so many movies fitting into easily-defined niches, those are refreshing characteristics.

Matt Damon stars in DOWNSIZING as Paul Safranak, a mild-mannered occupational therapist on staff with the Omaha Steaks company in Nebraska. He and his somewhat unhappy wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are charmed by what’s presented by slick salespeople as a luxurious lifestyle change (Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern are a stitch in small roles as ‘downsizing’ pitchmen). Scientists have discovered a way to shrink humans down to five inches with no damaging side effects (unless they forget to remove fillings in your teeth prior to the shrinking process. In that case your head will explode). Once one has ‘gotten small’ (an irreversible process), fewer resources are needed, upper-class comfort can be found within a couple of feet of living space, and your dollar has substantially more spending power. Scientists figure that if enough people choose this option and reside in environmentally friendly micro-communities, the world can be saved. Paul and Audrey decide to take the plunge, and in an extended sequence, the bizarre process of shrinking is detailed. This includes being shaved, receiving an enema, and being flipped onto a tiny gurney with a spatula.  Paul awakens from his surgery and, after checking to make sure his genitalia survived intact, is eager to join his wife. This brings us to the funniest scene in the film, where Audrey, one eyebrow shaved off, tries to explain on the phone to her husband why she got cold feet and has backed out of the deal. A dejected Paul settles in as a tiny bachelor, briefly dates a woman (Kerry Kenney) and makes friends with hard-partying neighbors Dusan (Christoph Waltz) and Konrad (Udo Kier), smugglers who make money bootlegging full-sized contraband. But Paul slowly discovers that this tiny world they call Leisureland is far from the paradise he’d been promised, too often emulating the normal-sized world with corruption, prejudice, rampant consumerism and chain restaurants while the miniature poor are walled off in a tiny ghetto. Worse, the downsizing process is being used for nefarious global ends, with dictators forcibly shrinking rivals and teeny terrorists infiltrating the U.S. border.

These early scenes where the central gimmick is milked with jokes and sight gags are the most conventional parts of DOWNSIZING. Around the halfway mark, we’re introduced to Dusan’s maid Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese illegal immigrant who was shrunk against her will while imprisoned as a dissident. Ngoc was the only survivor of a group who tried to make entry into the U.S. inside a TV box, losing a leg in the process. This is where DOWNSIZING changes tone and veers off into heavier territory. After Paul offers to repair Ngoc Lan’s defective prosthetic leg, she convinces him to help the lower-class ‘smalls’ who live outside the walls of Leisureland in a shabby housing project. DOWNSIZING suffers from a case of split personality, abandoning the gags for a heavy, end-of-the world twist and a boat trip to Norway to confront the scientist who invented the shrinking process. Some viewers may have trouble embracing this shift in tone, and the plot does meander toward the end, but I appreciated that Payne took the story in this direction instead of simply continuing the obvious comic possibilities of its premise. Hong Chau gives a heartbreaking, Oscar-worthy turn as Ngoc Lan. With her abrasive, broken English, she initially borders on caricature, but she’s given a couple of speeches that really give the film charm and emotional resonance. Damon is fine, though this role isn’t much of a stretch for him while I could watch the droll interplay between the great German actors Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier all day long (I’d love to see a spin-off film just about those two). Hard to classify, DOWNSIZING is that rare Hollywood movie that manages to say something and be not just entertaining, but funny as well. Recommended.

4 1/2 of 5 Stars