Down­siz­ing – first look review

Neat­ly offer­ing an escapist fan­ta­sy far from the grim absur­di­ties of Trump-era Amer­i­ca, Alexan­der Payne’s Kauf­manesque crowd-pleas­er ploughs one of his trade­mark every­man nar­ra­tives before veer­ing off for a wider look at the future of our plan­et, with romance and mush thrown in for good measure.

Matt Damon is Paul Safranek, the lit­tle man yearn­ing for more, who ditched aspi­ra­tions to become a doc­tor to nurse his sick mom back home in Oma­ha. Mom is ulti­mate­ly replaced by wife Audrey (Kris­ten Wiig), who push­es Paul to try a rev­o­lu­tion­ary cel­lu­lar-minia­tur­i­sa­tion pro­gramme pio­neered by the Nor­we­gians. ​‘Down­siz­ing’ is med­ical­ly safe, we’re told, and will solve not only the world’s over-pop­u­la­tion prob­lems, but also the desire to have more. Shrunk to five inch­es, the couple’s assets are now worth 100 times what they were in the old big, bad world. A new life, as a small, sud­den­ly seems very appeal­ing indeed – and sold, of course, like a win-win pack­age holiday.

As always, Payne explores the plight of the male in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca with ease (as he has so effec­tive­ly before, in Side­ways, Elec­tion and Nebras­ka). Here, after a notice­able lull mid­way, he shifts gears dra­mat­i­cal­ly, going for broke with the reli­ably sol­id (if unspec­tac­u­lar) Damon becomes some­thing of an eco torch bear­er, find­ing love with a Thai activist (Hong Chau) who was shrunk against her will as pun­ish­ment by an over-zeal­ous government.

It becomes clear, too, that down­siz­ing is being mis­used by ter­ror­ists and peo­ple smug­glers, by African lead­ers hell-bent on eth­nic cleans­ing, and by the Israelis on the Pales­tini­ans. To add fur­ther con­flict, a Trump-type sup­port­er ques­tions why small peo­ple should still have the vote, if they are no longer ​“par­tic­i­pat­ing” in the econ­o­my in the same way. Sud­den­ly, shrink­age is no longer the sim­ple solu­tion the Nor­we­gians believed it to be.

Christoph Waltz makes a wel­come appear­ance as an oily cig­ar-chomp­ing Ser­bian entre­pre­neur (with Udo Keir faith­ful­ly in tow), typ­i­cal­ly rel­ish­ing his screen time with a per­for­mance which all but steals the show while also high­light­ing how sim­i­lar, in fact, this small world is to the big bad one outside.

Down­siz­ing has an awful lot to grap­ple with – if any­thing, its bumpy tone high­lights the dif­fi­cul­ties work­ing with such an ambi­tious script (which Payne co-wrote with reg­u­lar writ­ing part­ner Jim Tay­lor). Had it been scaled back to a more mod­est frame­work, it might have felt more sat­is­fy­ing as a whole. Pro­grammed to open Venice – where pre­vi­ous open­ers such as Grav­i­ty, Bird­man and La La Land have won big dur­ing awards sea­son – the film is clear­ly being posi­tioned as a seri­ous Oscars con­tender. Whether it will res­onate with cin­e­ma audi­ences, only time will tell.

This is one of sev­er­al recent films to tap into the anx­i­ety sur­round­ing cli­mate change. With­out dras­tic action, the world does indeed seem doomed. While Down­siz­ing may not tack­le this quite as con­vinc­ing­ly as one would hope, it does offer an allur­ing dou­ble nar­ra­tive that shows the film­mak­er flex­ing his chops with a greater degree of scope than ever before. The result stacks up to much more than Hon­ey, I Shrunk the Grown-ups – Payne is clear­ly con­cerned about the future of our world, and he’s not afraid to say so.