The first 40 minutes of Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017)
is nothing short of spectacular. It starts off as an ambitious sci-fi that
satirically jabs at white privilege, mass consumption, social inequality,
environmental degradation, etc. Taking into account the previous commendable
works of Mr. Payne, the master satirist of American society (to say exactly,
the Midwestern culture), it is natural to expect him to address the
intriguingly laid-out premise and themes with great depth and alacrity. But the
narrative doesn’t quite take a leap, laboriously hopping from one idea to
another without fully exploring any single one. What’s more conspicuously
missing in Downsizing is Payne’s trademark acerbic wit and profound display of
human empathy.
Alexander Payne and his regular co-writer Jim Taylor
deserves praise for crafting a studio feature that tackles the inevitability of
global warming and ponders upon the fundamental inequalities, regardless of humankind’s
noble intentions and higher ideals. At
least for the first hour or so, Payne and Taylor explore their preoccupations
with vigor and acute observations which gradually broadens our marvel about
this sci-fi premise. A genial Norwegian scientist named Dr. Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard) invents a method to shrink human beings to about five inches. For
half a decade, he and handful of people shrink themselves and lead a life
without worrying much about carbon footprint. The scientists’ findings revealed
in a surprising press conference: a tiny man at a tiny podium, placed above a
normal-sized podium addresses the dumbfounded macro humans. The goal of the
shrinking, of course, is presented as a way to curb climate change, as Dr.
Asbjornsen’s ‘big’ colleague reveals how a tiny colony of people’s waste (for 5 yrs) could
be fit into large plastic bag. Within the next few years, shrinking becomes
both a lifestyle craze and ‘save-our-planet’ advocacy.
Few years later this technology has been fully commodified
in America. Old people consider retirement in the form of tiny person, since
being full-sized doesn’t bring much luxury. Moreover, a good portion of
Middle-class Americans are coaxed to downsize themselves through freshly inaugrated lilliputian utopian communities. When one is just five inches tall (0.0364
percent the size of their full-sized counterparts), everything including food
and material needs, gets smaller. Not only one could save the planet, but by
trading their limited nest eggs, middle-class families could lead a life of
great wealth in downsized worlds. Moreover, being small doesn’t affect
citizenship or right to vote. At least that’s what the brochures of different
tiny communities say. Of course, before consenting to miniaturization one
should also understand that there’s no way to reverse the process. All such
intrigues of the commoditized scientific invention are gracefully observed
through the perspective of Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), a physical therapist and
an average-American nice guy and his bored, irresolute wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig).
The pressure of taking care of (now-deceased) mom has affected
Paul’s pre-med studies. He’s only an low-paid occupational therapist and hasn’t
been able to buy his wife Audrey the home of their dreams. Taking the words of a
recently downsized friend, the couple visits ‘Leisureland’, a lavish,
crime-less suburb for the shrunken people. They learn that their equity will
radically enlarge once they become small. Paul’s mid-life crisis and perpetual
failures in life naturally pushes him towards this dreamland. The dates for
downsizing are all set. It leads to the film’s most brilliant scene, the
detailed process through which a person gets small: dental
work undone since fillings can’t shrink which can literally make your head
explode; row of people are sedated and nakedly lie on a stretcher, before
being placed inside a well-lit chamber (the levers pulled and knobs turned
outside the chamber could very well kindle the images of Nazi gas chamber); and
finally the room full of downsized people are moved to tiny stretchers using
spatulas (cinematographer Phedon Papamichael has done a magnificent job in
this scene). Just when Paul thinks his blissful life chapter is about to begin,
he learns that Audrey has had a change of heart.
The ‘Leisureland’ might be miniature in
size, but it’s pretty much a mirror image of larger flawed society (a literal
microcosm), with the same bureaucratic apathy, inequity, inequality,
immigration problems and so on. In countries that are less democratic, the
downsizing method is used upon the impoverished, dissidents, activists, etc.
Paul Safranek hears this appalling news from his new huge mansion. However, a year later we see him working in a corporate cubicle and living in a
teeny-tiny condo (the divorce probably has pushed him into this lucrative
financial position). Paul is once again leading a drab, boring life. From then
on, the narrative tries to make grand statements on poverty, exploited workers,
compassion, cults, inevitable destruction of human race, without ever sharply
focusing on the themes. What’s more worse is the dry characterization of Paul.
Unlike Alexander Payne’s consistently thorough look at the existential malaise
of middle-aged or old American Midwestern men (in Election, Sideways, About
Schmidt, The Descendants, and Nebraska), Downsizing’s Paul simply comes off as
a punchline, and that too a very tedious one. He is so noncommittal and impassive to
make any considerable impact in the proceedings.
Payne and Taylor’s highly ambitious
ideas not only fail to take root, they totally fumble with the task of creating an interesting
point of view. Christoph Waltz’s amoral yet charming black marketeer
Dusan looks like a vibrant character, but eventually gets lost in the convoluted
story structure. Hong Chau’s self-determined Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan Tran
(who was shrunk against her will for protesting against the government) could
have been the much-needed relief from Paul’s passive nature, but her character
too verges on caricature and almost reduced to a dramatic device. Hong does
provide a very committed performance, but somehow the latent romance between
Tran and Paul isn’t built up with earnestness. In films like Nebraska and About
Schmidt, Mr. Payne took story-lines rife with sentimentality and conceit to
turn it into deep, unflinching examinations of human condition. But
Downsizing’s later portions are plagued with cheap sentimental turns and
dramatically slack ideas. And despite the vast thematic constructs, Payne’s
ultimate message is pretty simple (being compassionate to the less fortunate is
pivotal than our preoccupations about survival of human race or obsession over
utopian society; and Payne usually don’t give messages, but simply raises
ponderous question) so as to not warrant these rough narrative twists.
By the time, the narrative moves to ‘shrinking procedure’
scene, Downsizing comes closer to John Frankenheimer’s under-appreciated
masterpiece Seconds (1966). That film tackled the dark ironies of human
condition alongside the era's highly politicized notions through the well-defined subjective angle of a existentially scarred middle-aged banker. Payne and Taylor’s script, however, moves
between individualistic and broader perspective, utterly failing to balance
between the two. Downsizing (135 minutes) is definitely a disappointing movie
from one of the great contemporary American film-maker; partly because the
audacious story elements never coalesce to form a powerful sci-fi satire. It’s
a lesson on how good intentions and challenging concepts could be easily marred
by weak execution.
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