Downsizing

This film doesn’t work.

I don’t bury leads, I fucking raise ’em from the dead, yo!

And, yeah, this thing just plain doesn’t work.

So, the basic premise behind Downsizing is that a process is developed to shrink people down to very small in order to solve the crises of overpopulation (don’t get me started, but I’ll likely touch on this later on…maybe…) and environmental abuse/ overexploitation.  Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig decide to undergo the procedure, as it would not only help the environment, but it would also improve their economic situations (what with relative costs and whatnot, something else I might touch on later).  Things go awry when Wiig bails, leaving Damon small and alone.  Later on, he befriends his pseudo-smuggler Serbian neighbor (played by Christoph Waltz) and a former Vietnamese dissident (played by Hong Chau, known to me pretty much exclusively as Cook Pu from How I Met Your Mother) and develops a new outlook on life.

Here’s the thing: the premise, namely the whole shrinking thing, is tossed aside after the first act, barely coming into play ever again.  Seriously.  After he’s shrunk, he might as well be normal size and just in some weird gated community or something, for all his size comes into play (considering everyone else he engages with is also small).  It almost makes me wonder what the point of it was.  But then I remembered this was supposed to be a comedic social satire.

Which brings me to the other issues with this damn thing.

First, it’s not funny.  Like, at all.  The trailer – one of the most misleading and overplayed trailers in some time – made it out to be a near-goofball-level comedy with some heart and feeling behind it.  Nope.  None of the “jokes” fall, the situations are droll at best, and only the light-hearted tone brings out any hint of comedy leanings throughout.  I think the only time I laughed was at the “eight kinds of fuck” joke, and that was mostly due to Hong Chau’s delivery, frankly.

Second, there’s no real plot.  The other major problem with the aforementioned trailer was that it hinted at some sort of devious plot underpinning the downsizing procedure (there’s a spot or two where tunnels are shown and someone hints that something unknown is going on).  Said plot does not exist.  If anything, this is a personal journey story for Damon, but his character is so bland and uninteresting – especially when compared to Waltz’s freewheeling dude, Hong Chau’s disaffected yet still caring dissident, and even Jason Sudeikis’s rich guy – that there’s no reason to care about him or his journey.  Some cool stuff is mentioned or hinted at, but we don’t get to partake in them, nor is any overarching plot waiting for us behind closed doors or something.

Third, the commentary doesn’t work.  I’m gonna get some pushback here, but I’ve never really seen writer/director Alexander Payne as much of a talent.  He’s got an eye, sure, but his themes always fall flat, and his films tend to be forgotten by me unless I purposefully remind myself of their existences later on.  This diaphanousness makes itself known here, as we’ve heard this commentary before: the planet is in need, and people are just too selfish, too nearsighted to fix what needs fixing.  Oh, and humanity’s everywhere, as is happiness, you just need to know where to look.  Yeah, thanks for those unique and new nuggets.  Moreover, the satire is often just mentioned on occasion:  Things like whether small people deserve full legal rights, the emptiness of luxury, the apparently inevitability of social stratification, and such are given scarcely more than a single conversation, if that, leaving us instead to focus on Blandy McGee’s ultimately uninteresting journey of self-discovery.  Apparently the irony was lost on Payne that a movie that purports to show the meaninglessness of selfishness and whatnot remains firmly and immovably tethered to a single dude’s selfish search for meaning and identity.

Even further, the commentary is misplaced.  Without going too far into screed territory, allow me to note that overpopulation (as a whole planet) is not the issue, but rather local overpopulation, regional misallocation of resources, general governmental failures, and so forth.  Also allow me to note that the economic implications of downsizing, especially considering it was meant to take decades to fully manifest itself, would be much more complex and damaging on both ends of the height spectrum than the film lets on, and that relative economies would eventually equalize in a fairly short amount of time (otherwise inflation would skyrocket).  It’s almost as if the writers didn’t realize that their perception of the issues they’re talking about were not only shallow, but also missing the impact of in-universe perception.  In other words, why would prices simply decrease at the same basic rate as the size of the product/service, considering that materials are only part of the equation and the amount of money is still technically the same?  Trust me, prices would definitely equalize, kids.  If you don’t know how to properly include complex situations, don’t use them, or, at least, don’t make them apparent.

Fourth, there’s a real mean streak regarding the targets of the satire, but it gets lost in the wishy-washy script.  Hippie-style environmentalists are treated as dread-sporting, drum-circling ninnies who would rather bury their heads in the sand and chuck it all than actually engage in problem-solving, but they’re also painted as being really nice, sweet, well-meaning, and even a little attractive intellectually.  The lower classes are painted almost stereotypically as societal clingers-on who rely on handouts and such with no real ambition, but are championed by a hard-working political dissident who acts selflessly in spite of everything.  The wealthy are treated like vacuous twits, but they’re the only ones enjoying themselves and are responsible for moving the story (or what little of it there is here) along at just about every point.  Hell, even the downsizing procedure is treated simultaneously like a failed fad and an exploitation machine, leaving us wondering how the filmmakers actually feel about it.  (Oh well, don’t worry, we’re not gonna linger on it, anyway.)  The balance doesn’t serve as an illustration of complexity, as the filmmakers possibly intended, but rather as distancing ambivalence that approaches pointlessness.

Finally, there’s a distinct lack of style at play here.  This sort of high-concept thing could have been helped along if the visuals matched the purported heights of the script, but, like the script, the film just comes off as bland and uninteresting.  Take the actual downsizing scene.  It’s treated as a clinical ballet, a sequence of choreographed movements set amidst a sterile backdrop.  Someone like Kubrick could have made this scene sparkle with visual nuance and style, but Payne is fine just seemingly half-assing it, leaving the scene just okay instead of lovely and/or interesting.  It’s all like that, no panache, no sparkle, not even any real grit or grime, just a bunch of plain, boring, nothing visuals that leave us gaping for something to give a shit about.  All in vain, kids.

The best part of this film, honestly, is something of a gimmick that’s thrown away anyway.  See, one of Waltz’s friends is a ship captain played by German actor Udo Kier.  At one point, these two Germanic (yes, I know Waltz is Autrian, but they share a common heritage down the way, kids) talents are engaging in some small talk on a boat, natürlich auf Deutsch, but we don’t get to hear it: the conversation is part of a zoom shot that’s focusing on others in the background.  I so desperately wanna know what they were saying to each other.  In my head, they’re just improvising some in-jokes or something that only Germanic folk like them would really get.  It’s a meeting of two Teutonic titans of cinema, and the only time I was really engaged with what was happening on the screen was when these two were present, especially together.

Bottom line, though, this isn’t a very good movie.  It’s not terrible, and it has some genuinely good messages buried in there somewhere, but it’s too dull, too uninteresting, and too uninterested in its own ideas to actually develop them into anything worth a damn.  Combine that with its lack of actual humor, and I’d say give it a pass unless you just really like the people involved to an extraordinary degree.  For all the times I saw this thing’s fucking trailer, I was hoping for some sort of closure, for the repetition to mean something, but alas.  Alas.