Tripwire Reviews Downsizing

Welcome To The Twilight Groan

♦ Tripwire’s senior editor ANDREW COLMAN took a look at Alexander Payne’s latest film, the whimsical sci-fi comedy Downsizing…

Downsizing
Director: Alexander Payne
Stars: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Udo Kier

Alexander Payne’s latest entry has been out for some time in the U.S., with the film either being gently rebuffed or being given all kinds of leeway by verbose, over-analytical reviewers desperate to find some method behind the director’s latest wheeze, not to mention a thematic or tonal connection with his earlier work. Either way, like the premise itself, an oddity about shrinking people to thimble size as a means to combat an impending environmental endgame, there’s a lot less to this work than meets the eye.

As someone who has admired Payne’s previous work, I am beholden, like all other reviewers, to list the hits in his canon – Election, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska, all of which poke acerbic fun at the mores, aspirations, petty jealousies and endemic failure of middle-aged American men. They are all wittily observed slices of slightly skewed Americana, never quite dark enough to unsettle and always played for comedy. Payne is not a maverick like Albert Brooks or John Cassavetes, but he is a far more precise filmmaker than them, so one wonders why he decided to leave his comfort zone with such alacrity.

I wandered into the screening room completely unaware of the movie’s storyline, and did groan somewhat when I learnt that it was, at least at first, a satire on Middle America’s need to upscale their world at the expense of their size. Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are a middle class couple who are struggling financially, and end up opting to have themselves shrunk to a tiny version of themselves after being given a hard sell about the benefits of living in a miniature community – automatic vast wealth, far larger living space, and of course generating far less waste.

It all seems too good to be true, but the bland everyman that is Paul Safranek is happy to look past his concerns, and goes ahead with the gruelling process (for some, the comedic highlight of the film, for me, an emetic) that will forever change his life. The trouble is, his other half jumps ship a

t the last moment, and he’s suddenly alone in the micro-community. It doesn’t take long for the movie to make the point that the human factor wasn’t mentioned in the marketer’s idealized pitch – people are still people here, there are hierarchies, and if anything, the hermetic existence of this enclosed world is just a parallel of the regular one. It’s an episode of the Twilight Zone with Ballardian tropes and loads of allegories and stuff! Whoda thunk it!

Our rather timid hero quickly adjusts to his new situation, however – he makes friends with his garrulous, party-animal neighbour Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz, gurning his way through the movie) who spends half his time reprimanding him for being so meek. He also meets Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau) a Vietnamese dissident who was forcibly shrunk by her country’s regime and made to live in a high rise (Ballard again) shanty town on the periphery of Leisureland’s opulent core. She immediately co-opts him into being her dogsbody, all barked orders and snappiness. Quite why she had to be such a stereotype, especially from another film entirely, remains a mystery – Payne had never gone near such contentious characterization before.

Before long, Safranek, Dusan, Ngoc Lan and Dusan’s friend Joris Konrad (Udo Kier) decide to visit the founder of the miniaturization program’s compound in Norway, morphing the film into a more straightforward doomsday / beachhead scenario, which finally impacts Paul enough to actually make a decision rather than remain passive. I won’t give away the ending but when I explained the plot to my eleven year old daughter she got the point. They were making it up as they went along, right, like In Lost?

This was a pet project of Payne’s that was side lined due to The Descendants taking precedence. The idea must’ve seemed worthwhile initially, the subject matter more expansive and ambitious than anything he had done before, or indeed since. But it’s a muddled mess that at best is a blank page through which people can find a narrative thread or arc which just isn’t there. The film does have interesting things to say about humanity, but ideas keep on vanishing into the ether just as they pique our interest. The comic touches on the other hand (such as when Damon has to draw a giant signature on his divorce papers) are deftly handled, a knowing throwback to the 50s sci-fi classics which ironically allegorized far more smoothly than the overbearing silliness here.

One of the key problems may have been with Damon himself – a tireless actor who clearly needs to be a little more discerning with his career choices. For a leading man and former action hero he has too often played the average schmuck, although you would think that with a Payne movie, he’d be an excellent fit but he’s just too nebulous to have an arc that carries any weight at all. Perhaps the originally cast Paul Giamatti would’ve brought considerably more nuance to the role. Even more absurd is the scope of the film – at 135 minutes, the film is both too long and far too brief to deal with the smorgasbord of ideas Payne wanted to shoehorn into the narrative. The final 30 minutes bear little to no connection with what has come before, the continuity of the characters being small ineptly dispensed with, as if it was surplus to the message (whatever that may have been).

Logistically, none of this works. And don’t tell me to suspend disbelief when the filmmakers can’t be bothered. There’s little sense in the final reel’s journey (Payne’s films are always about journeys) when it’s underpinned by lazy storytelling. The script, as sharp as one would expect in the first half, also loses all focus by this point, but it doesn’t compare to earlier efforts in any case. The film recedes all too easily into pulpy self-indulgence, with reheated tropes that remind me of three tales from E.C.’s Weird Fantasy haphazardly spliced together. A frustrating misfire.

Downsizing is out in UK cinemas from 24 January